Carbon Fluency
Architects and engineers have great power because they make decisions that influence resource and energy use in their buildings. With great power comes great responsibility and now is the time to become fluent in the language of embodied carbon. In this episode Kristof has a lively conversation with Z. Smith and Kelsey Wotila fromEskewDumezRipple on this and some adjacent topics.
Z Smith, AIA
Z Smith is Principal and Director of Sustainability and Building Performance at EskewDumezRipple. His built work includes academic, laboratory and residential buildings, including winners of the RAIC Green Building Award and the AIA COTE Top Ten Award. He brings training and experience in physics (MIT) and engineering (Princeton) to the field of architecture (UC Berkeley), and is named as inventor on 10 patents and author on over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He serves as North American representative to the International Union of Architects (UIA) Sustainable Development Commission. He has taught at the Tulane School of Architecture, served on the national Advisory Group of the AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE), the USGBC Energy & Atmosphere Technical Advisory Group, served as Chair of the 2017 SCUP Southern Regional Conference, and is former Chair of the US Green Building Council (USGBC) Louisiana Chapter. He is a member of the International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (I2SL), the Society of Building Science Educators (SBSE), and the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP).
Kelsey Wotila
Kelsey joins EDR as the studio’s yearlong Research Fellow, exploring what it would take for a case study of EDR projects to meet the Zero Net Carbon operation and 50% reduction in embodied carbon established by the Architecture2030 organization.
After receiving her Bachelor of Environmental Design from University of Colorado, Boulder and her M. Arch from University of Colorado Denver (where she was the Henry Adams Medal Recipient), Kelsey worked as a Ghost Residency Intern at Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects and as an Architectural Intern at Anderson Mason Dale Architects.
She maintains that the role of architect should be as advocate, for the client and for the site, and on a macro scale, for the planet. The resulting architecture is the solution that fulfills the needs of the land, the user, and future users. As architects, she believes it is our role to blend numbers and beauty in creating sustainable spaces that people love
Buy clean CA
In 2017, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB262 into law, enacting the Buy Clean California Act. To “Buy Clean” means to spend California taxpayer money in a way that helps cut the pollution that causes climate change. It means that suppliers’ emissions performance will be taken into account when an agency is contracting to buy steel, flat glass, and mineral wool (insulation) for infrastructure projects.
Manufacturers who operate the most polluting plants will no longer be given a “free pass” for their pollution – and manufacturers who have invested in reducing their pollution will see the returns. By including suppliers’ emissions performance in procurement decisions, the state can influence business decisions among the many suppliers who want to provide goods to public agencies.
The Buy Clean approach allows California to help clean businesses and industries maintain their position as strong, global leaders on climate action. It creates additional motivation for suppliers to reduce their climate pollution. The state’s substantial purchasing power already makes it an attractive market for firms across the United States, and around the world.
USGBC-LA is proud to assist manufacturers of steel, flat glass, and mineral wool insulation through the Buy Clean Incentive Program by offering incentives of up to $15,000. The incentive can be used to acquire their Environmental Product Declaration and green their own supply chain and manufacturing processes. The key dates have been updated for when the EPDs will be required by the state for procurement on new projects. The key dates are:
January 1, 2019 – EPDs will be requested by the state.
January 1, 2020 – EPDs will be required by the state.
January 1, 2021 – DGS publishes the maximum acceptable GWP for eligible materials.
July 1, 2021 – EPDs will be required and used to gauge GWP compliance of eligible materials.
Buy Clean Washington
On January 8, 2018, members of the Washington (WA) State House of Representatives introduced House Bill (HB) 2412 – Creating the Buy Clean Washington Act to the state legislature. Modeled after the Buy Clean California Act, HB 2412 proposed that WA state agencies awarding construction contracts require environmental product declarations (EPDs) for an eligible list of materials. Although the bill did not move forward for debate and voting in the 2018 legislative session, a modified version of the proposed study was included in the capital.
The capital budget authorized the UW College of Built Environments to collaborate with the Central Washington University (CWU) Construction Management Program and the Washington State University (WSU) Architecture and Engineering School to “analyze existing embodied carbon policy and propose methods to categorize structural materials and report structural material quantities and origins.” The result of this work is the Buy Clean Washington Study.
EC3 Tool
The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool, is a free and easy to use tool that allows benchmarking, assessment and reductions in embodied carbon, focused on the upfront supply chain emissions of construction materials. The EC3 tool has been incubated at the Carbon Leadership Forum with input from nearly 50 industry partners, and utilizes building material quantities from construction estimates and/or BIM models and a robust database of digital, third-party verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). Powered by this data, the EC3 tool can be implemented in both the design and procurement phases of a construction project to look at a project’s overall embodied carbon emissions, enabling the specification and procurement of the low carbon options.
The EC3 tool also allows owners, green building certification programs and policymakers to assess supply chain data in order to create EPD requirements, and set embodied carbon limits and reductions, at the construction material and project scale.
The tool and its subsequent effect on the industry is driving demand for low-carbon solutions and incentivizing construction materials manufacturers and suppliers to invest in disclosure, transparency and material innovations that reduce the carbon emissions of their products.
Carbon Leadership Forum Tool
In 2015, countries around the world came together to negotiate the Paris Agreement, a historic framework underpinned by the long-term goal to stop global temperatures from rising above 2°C. In an effort to further ensure the prevention of irreversible climate change, governments also included an ambitious target to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C, which would require emissions to peak by 2020 and fossil fuels to be phased out by 2055.
Each year, the built environment contributes almost 40% of CO2 emissions worldwide. Overall, most of this is due to energy required to operate existing buildings, including lighting, equipment, heating and cooling. However, between now and 2060 the world’s population will be doubling the amount of building floorspace, equivalent to building an entirely new New York City every month for 40 years. Ever heard of “embodied carbon”?
Most of the carbon footprint of these new buildings will take the form of embodied carbon — the emissions associated with building construction, including extracting, transporting, and manufacturing materials. Over the past two decades, we’ve made significant progress in reducing carbon emissions associated with operating buildings. However, according to Architecture 2030, “new research from the IPCC, the UN, and the scientific community stresses the critical importance of a 2030 milestone: if we do not achieve a 45-55% reduction in total global emissions by 2030 we will have lost the opportunity to meet the 1.5/2 ℃ warming threshold and climate change will become irreversible. The immediate focus for embodied carbon reductions must therefore be on the next decade. Annually, the embodied carbon of building structure, substructure, and enclosures are responsible for 11% of global GHG emissions and 28% of global building sector emissions. Eliminating these emissions is key to addressing climate change and meeting Paris Climate Agreement targets.”
Tally
Architects, engineers, and contractors have begun to focus more of their efforts on reducing the amount of energy used to operate buildings. However, the energy and environmental impacts related to the manufacture, transportation, and construction and demolition of building materials are not yet widely understood or tracked during the design process. While many architects and engineers are aware of these embodied environmental impacts, few have the resources and expertise to be able to examine and compare the overall sustainability of different building material choices.
UNDERSTANDING LCA
Understanding the impact of building materials involves Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), an in-depth form of analysis performed on whole buildings, manufactured building products and materials, and material assemblies. While LCAs provide a complete picture of the environmental impacts associated with a building, the practice of LCA is relatively new and confounding for most building professionals. Until recently, LCAs were typically conducted after construction, rather than during the design and planning process when the data could actually influence design decisions.
BUILDING A BETTER MODEL
In principle, architects and other building professionals should be able to conduct LCAs using the Building Information Models (BIM) that are a part of standard architectural practice. In reality, building models do not contain all the ingredients that go into a building. A BIM model might recognize a steel assembly, for example, but it would not take into account that most steel assemblies use a significant amount of concrete as well. In order to address this challenge, KieranTimberlake's affiliate company, KT Innovations, partnered with Autodesk and thinkstep to create Tally, a Revit plugin that allows Revit users to imbue their BIM models with information about the building materials and architectural products their completed structures will ultimately contain. In addition to quantifying emissions to land, air, and water, Tally also factors a building or material's embodied environmental impacts. Essentially, Tally adds another layer of detail to BIM models by recognizing materials that are not modeled explicitly, like the concrete in steel assemblies, and by taking into account a model's diverse range of material classes. In doing so, Tally gives its users the power to conduct whole building LCAs or to use LCA data to run comparative analyses of various design options.
LCA AT THE SPEED OF DESIGN
As Tally users design their BIM models in Revit, they assign building materials and quantities to create a Bill of Materials for the full building or constituent parts. This Bill of Materials automatically updates as the design changes, allowing architects and engineers to see in real-time the impact their design choices have on their buildings' overall sustainability. Consequently, Tally allows designers to move from typologies and “rule of thumb” environmental impact calculations to real-time assessments at pivotal moments. No other environmental assessment tool currently available can achieve this kind of inventory at the same speed.
Tally also facilitates communication between different groups within a project team by presenting its generated data clearly and legibly. By sorting, grouping, and displaying information simply and succinctly, Tally allows users to produce data graphics that are readily comprehensible, transparent, and customizable. In this way, information that is normally abstract becomes very well defined, allowing clients, contractors, architects, and engineers alike to make accurate and nuanced decisions.
As energy efficiency becomes more and more crucial to the built environment—and as energy codes become increasingly stringent—the embodied energy, carbon counts, and other environmental impacts of building materials will inevitably become a proactively calculated and well understood factor in reducing the total amount of resources buildings consume. Tally helps building professionals stay ahead of this curve. To learn more or to request a free trial, visit choosetally.com.
RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge
RIBA has developed the 2030 Climate Challenge to help architects meet net zero (or better) whole life carbon for new and retrofitted buildings by 2030. It sets a series of targets for practices to adopt to reduce operational energy, embodied carbon and potable water. If all RIBA Chartered Practices meet the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge targets, they will play their part in addressing this global crisis.
Architecture 2030
For over a decade, in a concerted effort to combat the projected consequences of climate change, Architecture 2030 and collaborators have championed the cause of sustainable and carbon-neutral planning and design in the built environment.
Architecture 2030 has a highly successful track record of innovation and program implementation engaging the design community and sub-national, national and international governments. Architecture 2030 initiated the 2030 Challenge in 2006, which led to the zero emissions movement in the global building sector and has since been adopted by architectural design firms, states, cities, counties, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), International Union of Architects, US Conference of Mayors, and the China Accord.
In addition to the 2030 Challenge, other initiatives and programs leading to the zero emissions movement in the global built environment include:
The Challenges
The 2030 Challenge – AIA created the 2030 Commitment—a national framework with simple metrics and a standardized reporting format—to provide a structure for tracking progress and help you meet the 2030 Challenge targets. Over 400 A/E/P firms have adopted the 2030 Commitment with over 2.6 billion sq ft of project work reported in 2015 alone.
The 2030 Challenge for Planning – This Challenge is the goal set for the 2030 Districts Network, a membership of 18 private-sector-led, high performance urban building districts across North America. 2030 Districts are led by the private sector, with local building industry leaders, community groups and government to achieve significant energy, water, and emissions reductions.
The 2030 Challenge for Embodied Carbon – This Challenge, originally the 2030 Challenge for Products, spawned the Embodied Carbon Network, which now has over 400 members from 110 cities across the world. Architecture 2030 and the Network collaborated to create the Carbon Smart Materials Palette – an attribute-based approach to embodied carbon emissions reductions for major building elements that will guide building design and construction, and government procurement policies.
AIA Resolution For Immediate & Sustained Climate Action
“This is a defining moment for the Institute,” said 2019 AIA President Bill Bates, FAIA. “We are making this our top priority in order to address the crisis our communities face. Moving the needle on this critical issue—that threatens the future of our planet and humanity—requires our firm commitment to achieving carbon neutral goals in the built environment and our immediate action. It’s imperative that the industry acts today.”
ZEROCODE
The ZERO Code is a national and international building energy standard for new building construction that integrates cost-effective energy efficiency standards with on-site and/or off-site renewable energy resulting in zero-net-carbon buildings.
The ZERO Code includes prescriptive and performance paths for building energy efficiency compliance based on current standards that are widely used by municipalities and building professionals worldwide.
Team
Hosted by Kristof Irwin
Edited and Produced by M. Walker