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Recent News, Research, Resources, and Discussion
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Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) news and media.
How to calculate embodied carbon from Orlando Gibbons and John Orr with IStructE informs structural engineers and other building professionals about strategies and details behind accounting for embodied carbon in design. This is a valuable overview of common embodied carbon calculation practices; it covers ways to communicate, advocate, and engage with the project team about these ideas, and the importance of reporting carbon data to a database, while still acknowledging that carbon is only one component of sustainability.
Embodied carbon in construction materials: a framework for quantifying data quality in EPDs. Accurately tracking a building’s embodied carbon can be difficult. This paper investigates the need for more transparency behind impact data to enable fairer comparisons of EPDs. Tracking data variability and uncertainty in EPDs that stems from upstream data sources, verifying functional equivalence, and varied life-cycle scope between EPDs is essential to taking meaningful steps toward accurate embodied carbon accounting.
Bringing Building Materials to Life features the research of Wil Srubar, CLF Co-Chair and CAEE professor at CU Boulder. Srubar leads the Living Materials Laboratory that brings biochemistry, microbiology, materials science, and structural engineering to focus on how microorganisms can enhance our building materials with material growth, self-healing, bioluminescence, and environmental response.
Carbon Metrics: Assessing & Controlling GHG Emissions Across Scales is a collection of 14 excellent academic resources for understanding aspects of carbon policy.. These papers address such topics as geographically-specific GHG reduction strategies, stakeholders in carbon quantification, leveraging emissions targets to ensure meaningful outcomes, and how to set carbon targets.
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Asia Pacific Embodied Carbon Primer builds on the World Green Building Council’s previous publication, Bringing Embodied Carbon Upfront, with a regional focus, investigating topics like the CIC Carbon Assessment Tool, which launched September 2019 in Hong Kong. Asia-Pacific is one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change with +8 of the 10 deadliest natural disaster events in 2018
occurring there. However, there is still a need to expand the conversation from operational carbon to embodied carbon. Asia Pacific is likely to be at the center of manufacturing growth on the global stage. This is an opportunity for the region to “futureproof competitiveness in a more accountable world.”
Nano-Infused Cements: Part of a Movement Towards Less describes another strategy for lowering the carbon impact of concrete that is being used on projects in North America. Because cement production is the main contributor to concrete’s carbon footprint, we must not only focus on using less cement, but also improving how it is made. One way to do this is to use modern internal curing technologies with nano-infused colloidal silica cement to maintain moisture and speed curing, reducing the need for additional cement to attain early strengths.
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