Minimizing Embodied Carbon by Design

This class is taught by Larry Strain and Chris Magwood, two thought leaders in the field of embodied carbon. Both, unusually, have careers combining research and practice. Larry, co-founder of the award-winning Bay Area architecture firm of Siegel & Strain, for decades has infused his design practice with applied research as a means of creating buildings that are both beautiful and green. Larry will share his recent work, focused on analyzing the relative carbon impacts of low-carbon renovation of existing buildings versus construction of new, low-carbon/net-zero buildings. Chris, a natural building pioneer, serves as executive director of the Endeavour Centre, a not-for-profit sustainable building school in Ontario, Canada, where he applies his research via teaching and construction of low/no-carbon buildings. Chris will present his recent work on construction methods that maximize carbon sequestration.

Learning Objectives
After completing this class, participants will be able to:

– Describe the significance and scale of embodied carbon within the context of building lifecycle emissions.
– Articulate the carbon value of reusing and retrofitting existing buildings as compared with constructing new ones.
– Incorporate carbon-sequestering construction methods into building designs.
Enumerate the non-energy, non-climate benefits of both building reuse and adoption of the illustrated building methods and strategies.

Instructors:

Larry Strain, Siegel & Strain Architects
Chris Magwood, the Endeavour Centre

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Thank you ian for launching us this morning um i’m delighted to introduce my two colleagues and uh i’ll start by saying that we share some history so larry chris and i all were involved in straw bale construction starting in the 90s and um i we didn’t meet i didn’t meet

Chris until much later larry and i met pretty much in the 90s so we’ve been playing in this space for a long time and um both of us i guess all three of us really have been very concerned about embodied carbon that entire time so in fact i did my master’s thesis with

A focus on embodied carbon in 1995 so it’s been a long road and i’m absolutely tickled to be able to um have persuaded these two leading lights in this field to put this class together for you all as they continue to innovate and educate and inspire many many people within our industry

As ian said chris has recorded his presentation because he’s off somewhere in the remote areas of ontario where he lives ontario canada that is however he will be able to join us for q a at the end so if you have questions that come up during chris’s portion

Jot them down and you’ll be able to quiz him when the time comes so about chris he uh has been in the building field for a quarter century built his first permitted straw bale house in ontario in 1996 and um since then he has designed and built many many other buildings and

Really been focusing very much on the embodied carbon issue most recently um he did a masters at trent university a few years ago where he studied the carbon storage potential of the built environment published a thesis on this subject and has been really completely enmeshed in helping educate the rest of

The folks in our field about this ever since he has also authored seven other books on sustainable building and is has another book that is somewhere in the publication process at the moment co-edited with bruce king called building beyond zero new ideas for carbon smart architecture and which i

Believe larry and i both have chapters so there we go we are conspiring once again so on to larry as i mentioned larry and i’ve known each other for a very long time and had many opportunities to collaborate and conspire in this field which has been great fun

He is one of the founders and principals of siegel and strain architecture architects in berkeley california sorry emeryville on the edge of berkeley and sealant strain has won many many top design awards from the aia and other organizations for their groundbreaking work in sustainable design um along with his partners who are

Quite numerous at this point and actually larry and his partner henry who started the firm are now kind of taking the back seat and putting even more time and energy into this research area so that’s why larry may be less involved with the firm at this point but he is by no means

Leaving the industry leading he is leaving he is not so with that i will turn it over to larry take it away thanks so much for being here okay i think that’s it great thank you so much um we’re happy to be here i’m happy to be

Here chris is virtually happy to be here we’re going to talk about embodied carbon and why it’s important and how to minimize it so let’s do i’m going to get this at some point so this is kind of what the day is going to look like what it is why it’s important embodied

Emissions from buildings and sort of the time value of carbon emissions uh reducing embodied carbon using standard materials and methods which is a case study that i’ll be sharing and then chris has got a whole thing on uh carbon storing and carbon sequestering materials that will be pre-recorded which will show that

And then i’m going to close by talking about the importance of existing buildings in this whole discussion about embodied carbon and a little bit on tools that are available so starting with definitions first of all when we talk about carbon in this slideshow we’re talking about all greenhouse gases we probably already

Know that but it’s all the methane carbon co2 everything it’s all just a shorthand for talking about that um operating emissions are all the greenhouse gas emissions from operating a building and it includes direct emissions from on-site fossil fuel combustion at the building and indirect emissions from the electricity used to

Power the buildings these emissions are ongoing and cumulative over time bodied emissions are the carbon footprint of a material the greenhouse gas from extracting processing and transporting the emissions and it typically represents a huge hit of carbon emissions at the beginning of a building’s life but it also includes

Emissions from maintenance and repairs that happen over time as well and body carbon doesn’t have to be emissions it could also be stored or sequestered avoided carbon which we’ll talk about too is the uh about saving the savings from a particular choice for instance renovating and upgrading a building

Compared to tearing it down and rebuilding it or building with carbon sequestering materials compared to building with materials that generate carbon uh material and carbon emissions you’ve probably seen this chart before many of you have buildings make up about 40 of global emissions 28 percent is from operating all the

Buildings we already have and 11 is the embodied emissions from building buildings and the thing the point i like to make with this is that operations is mostly existing embodied emissions are mostly new although it does include renovations of existing buildings but most of the emissions are coming from building new buildings

The majority of embodied emissions happen when the building is built what this means is for the buildings we build between now and 2030 if we continue to build the way we currently build about 80 percent of their carbon footprint will be embodied so for new buildings over the next

Critical 10 years reducing embodied emissions is key to tackle operating emissions we need to make new buildings net zero but even more importantly we need to reduce the operating emissions from existing buildings and we’ll get to that later the majority of embodied emissions typically are from the materials we

Built with they can make up 70 to 80 percent the rest are from our emissions directly associated with construction the site work and utilities required for the project many embodied carbon studies leave out these other emissions and many aren’t even counting all the materials some only include structural materials these

Percentages will vary by project sometimes site work or transport can be significant but the bottom line is most embodied emissions are currently from the from the materials we build with embodied emissions vary by construction type this is what it looks like for how we currently build average emissions for

New buildings range from about 500 kilograms of emissions per cubic meter for a large concrete steel building down to about 250 kilograms for light wood frame buildings like typical homes in the us renovations when they can save the high carbon parts of the building the structure and the foundation have a

Much smaller footprint compared to new construction and it’s possible to reduce all of these more by using low carbon materials in a few minutes chris is going to talk about carbon storing and carbon sequestering materials and how to make this graph drop below zero but i want to start by talking about standard

Materials and practices larry before you before you go on could you go back to that last slide so when you say for example 500 kilograms per square meter do you mean per square meter of floor area yeah yeah it’s typically measured in floor area yeah okay great thank you sure

And this is based on what’s that i heard you say cubic meter but the graph was in square meters it’s in square meters yeah it’s in square meters it’s a i misspoke um all right so our firm knew about the importance of the body carbon since as anne mentioned or the early 90s

But we at first we just focused on reducing the carbon footprint of concrete because we knew how important it was we didn’t know much about the embodied emissions from all the rest of the materials the first project we tried to do this on was the portola valley town center a

Lead platinum really efficient project built with the conscious effort to use low impact low carbon materials this is designed with growing and strata architects and an incredible team of consultants the town had occupied an old school on an 11-acre site which the district had abandoned 20 years earlier because it

Sat directly on top of the san andreas fault which are those pink lines these are traces of the san andreas in portola valley the existing buildings on the left were deconstructed and the materials were reused in a new town center just outside the fault zone we were also able to reduce the building

Footprint and paved areas and increase the landscape and playing fields we had a very involved community and a lot of input from the community on the project throughout the project which was really helpful restoration was an important part of the project we introduced a lot of native

Planting and habitat this is a portion of the creek that we uncovered and it forms the fourth side of the town green the community halls in the background so after it’s completed we decided to try and measure all of the carbon emissions from building the project the

Embodied co2 this is before there were tools like tally available so the first thing you had to do to calculate the carbon footprint was figure out how much everything weighed and you can see the concrete foundations and slabs accounted for most of the weight about 80 percent of the weight of

These buildings was concrete this is even though these were wood frame buildings clad in wood with wood paneling wood ceilings and some wood flooring wood only accounted for 12 percent of the total weight of the project next we calculated the carbon footprint of all the materials using a carbon

Database that gave us kilograms of emissions per kilogram of material again concrete accounted for the largest amount but only forty percent of the total emissions were concrete wood was about twelve percent steel a little over thirteen percent even though by weight we used half as much steel as we did would

The new framing lumber was all fsc certified and most of the rest of it was reclaimed we didn’t count sequestration for the new lumber which would have lowered our wood number significantly so then we modeled a base case project using standard material choices which are the orange bars on this chart and

Compared to the materials we actually used which are the blue bars concrete not only accounted on the far left there concrete not only accounted for the largest portion of emissions it was also where we realized the largest savings about an 80 ton reduction from using a high slag high fly ice concrete mix

The other interesting thing we learned was that we saved about 40 tons by using the salvaged wood it shows up here as a negative number on this chart because a the salvaged wood is not going to landfill and decomposing and turning into methane and b because the trees we

Didn’t have to cut down are still growing sequestering carbon the overall reduction was a little over 30 percent and this was really mostly from those two sources from concrete and recycle and reclaimed were there other ones where we we saved uh saved a little bit here and there but

That was you can see that down at the bottom the reductions in each category and the largest one is in structure but finishes which includes the wood was also pretty large this is the multi-purpose room in the community hall and the reading room in the library almost all the wood was salvaged from

The old school buildings re-milled and used on the ceilings and walls the floor in the multi-purpose room is eucalyptus from trees that were cleared for fire safety reasons and milled and dried within a few miles of the site everybody got on board with the salvaged wood the town because it recalled the

Old school buildings which they had loved and the contractor also really got onto when he realized we were running out of salvaged wood from the old school he took the wood crates that the metal roofing came in and re-milled it and used it for window trim without even

Asking us he just went ahead and did it which was we thought was great all the exterior siding is salvaged redwood from northern california a nod to the many tall redwoods growing on the site the sun shades are salvaged yellow cedar chosen because it weathers to a silvery

Gray which better bounces light into the buildings the beams supporting the sun shades were also salvaged from the old school buildings so how do the embodied emissions compare with the operating missions for this project as usual for operating we started with a passive approach maximize natural ventilation and daylighting minimize

Heat getting heat gain with shading use thermal mass for nighttime cooling and we modeled this all with our engineers to optimize our choices after we had done all that we were in the position to use small very efficient mechanical systems which saved both first cost and operating costs

The buildings use about half as much energy as as a building designed to california title 24 and most of that was supplied by on-site tvs embodied carbon embodied co2 is usually counted as so many years worth of operatic co2 and over the projected life hundred year lifespan of these buildings even

Accounting for increases due to repairs and maintenance the embodied emissions for the as built project were about 13 of the projected operating emissions which wasn’t very significant but here’s the thing we don’t actually have 100 years we have about 20 years to get to zero when you

Focus on the next 20 years the embodied emissions are about half the total but even that’s not the whole story embodied emissions and operating emissions don’t happen at the same time embodied emissions happen at the beginning of a building’s life mostly before operating emissions even begin so

It’s not just how much carbon you save it’s when you save it that matters maybe even more here’s why we call this the time value of carbon we borrow this graph from a book called heat by george monbiot a british writer and climate activist this is a page from

An article i wrote for building green many years ago at this point 15 years ago the lines represent different rates of greenhouse gas reductions the middle line is a steady 10 percent reduction per year the green line up at the top starts slow and then increases the rate of reduction over time

The red line starts fast and then tapers off the area below each line is the totally carbonated carbon emitted over time under each scenario the red line wins early savings matter saving in body carbon front loads building savings there are also ways to reduce embody carbon even more which chris is going to

Talk about and now i hope through the wonders of technology we’re going to hear from a pre-recorded chris to tell us about more radical ways of approaching embodied carbon emissions hey everyone thanks for uh inviting me to present with you today uh i’m really sorry that i’m not presenting live uh

The opportunity to uh share a stage with uh with larian and it’s always a pleasure and uh i’m really hoping that i will um be be jumping in on the q and a session so if you have any questions about what i’m presenting uh please hold on to those and uh and

We’ll take care of that at the end of the session briefly my name is chris magwood i work with builders for climate action in ontario canada and i’m going to be presenting today on turning buildings into carbon sinks looking at the the accounting for and the types of materials uh that can do

That and also a couple of case study buildings that i’ve been involved with in my practice up here in canada so i just want to start by kind of grounding my um devotion to this work to the sort of upcoming generation i have a daughter who’s in her late 20s now

And uh she was part of kicking me into really paying attention to the carbon footprint of my buildings um she has known you know growing up that i do this green building thing she grew up in a straw bale house so she knows you know a little bit about this but you

Know one day she sort of asked me um she was about 16 like dad is this stuff you’re doing like is it gonna save the climate and and that was really you know it was a jarring moment for me because you know i had been doing green building for 20

Years at that point and you know felt really well grounded in knowing that my buildings were energy efficient and that they were healthy and that they were using local resources and you know you know we’ve really been paying attention to all kinds of factors but but climate

Change just hadn’t been um central to that i guess i’d always assumed oh i probably am um but but that question and then the sort of um less than questions the sort of demands from uh from the younger generation really spurred me to in my own practice trying to figure this out

And that has kind of uh led to trying to help others do the same so i’m going to start just by talking about how current life cycle assessment practice works for biogenic carbon i works might be in air quotes because i don’t think it really does work right now i think it’s a

A real flaw in lca how biogenic carbon is handled it makes sense it was not you know when people started doing life cycle assessment for buildings carbon storage was not really on the agenda and in a lot of ways still isn’t because the only biogenic material people really consider

Uh to date is wood and we’ll get into sort of wood and timber products and and how this works for them but in current lca there’s actually you’re allowed to account for biogenic carbon in three different ways and that in itself is confusing because you know anybody doing an lca can choose

Any of those three ways which automatically means their results aren’t really comparable to somebody who’s chosen one of the other two ways and the first way is kind of it basically just says ignore biogenic carbon you sort of make this assumption that a bunch of carbon comes out of the

Atmosphere and ends up in this biogenic material you know before it’s turned into a product and you just assume that at the end of its life all of that carbon is going to come out into the atmosphere so you just call it zero you basically just ignore it completely

And even though that seems really strange it’s uh you know it’s considered a valid means of addressing biogenic carbon in life cycle assessment and shockingly to me even manufacturers of products with significant amounts of biogenic carbon in them produce lca’s and environmental product declarations based on those lcas

In this fashion so you have uh things like the cellulose industry um you know put out an environmental product declaration which completely ignores the fact that their material is a massive source of biogenic carbon storage so this is the the zero zero method and um it’s still you know quite common i hope

That we’ll see this uh fade as everybody realizes that the value of biogenic carbon but currently this is still considered a valid way of addressing this the minus one plus one method is somewhat similar in that um it it counts you sort of in your assessment you count the carbon that was

Pulled out of the atmosphere and is stored in the material uh at the front so in the a1 um sort of harvesting section of an lca you say you know if there’s 20 kilograms of carbon stored in this material that came out of the atmosphere

You say there’s a minus 20 like 20 came out of the atmosphere and then at the end of the life cycle you say and that 20 came back out here um and or you can say well not all of that 20 came out at the end we’re gonna

You know say that you know x amount of the material goes to landfill and therefore this much carbon comes out or this much of it gets incinerated and so this much carbon comes out but essentially you know you’re kind of using the minus and the plus to come up with a um

A figure for the end of life and it’s usually ends up being a positive number so showing that the material still has sometimes a significant carbon footprint even though it has this this large amount of carbon stored in it sorry so this seems like it should be a good way

To do this um but it highlights a really a really critical issue with lca practice as it’s done right now which is that we it ignores the importance of time in thinking about emissions and carbon storage so we tend to fixate on that um you know the final number for for a

Material when we’re looking at lca we like you know add up all the minuses and we add up all the positives and and we get to this number uh you know at the end of life that’s the total of all of those things and that that single factor tends

To be what we use for making comparisons between materials so you know if we’re if we kind of use the minus one plus one but only pay attention to the end result we miss a whole lot and what we miss is that you know here’s that sort of map

Of a biogenic material so there’s a big drawdown in the a stage when the when the material is growing when it’s drawing those plants are photosynthesizing uh co2 out of the atmosphere and then you know that green line is rising as it’s harvested transported produced built you know maintained fixed and then

Finally uh the the building is taken down or the materials taken out and something happens to it at the end of its life so there’s kind of your your trace of a minus one plus one uh accounting for for a biogenic material and here’s the path that a conventional material would take

You know looking at it the same way the conventional material has no biogenic component or no significant biogenic component so everything is an emission from harvesting transporting manufacturing etc all the way to end of life it’s an accumulation of emissions what happens if we’re fixated on that

End of life result only is that those two materials don’t look very different you go oh the biogenic material is like yeah you know this percent or that percent uh less impactful than than the than the conventional one but it’s not so much and so

If it costs more or you know if there’s any other impediment to using it it often just kind of gets written out of the design because look it’s not you know it’s not making that big a difference and so what we need to be thinking about in in life cycle assessment is the

Dynamics of time and you know what it means to to think about emissions as they occur and what happens when they occur and in this case when you take the carbon out of the atmosphere and put it in a building material which lasts you know a reasonably long time we can measure in

In at least decades and hopefully a century or two it’s not the little green dot number out at the end that tells us what the impact that materials had on the atmosphere on the on the climate it’s the area under that zero line it’s this whole green area is the positive

Climate impact from removing that co2 and storing it you know it got removed at the start of the building process or when the material was manufactured and it stayed out of the atmosphere the entire time that that that product was in the building alternatively we have to think about the area above

The line as being the warming impact from the emissions of a material that has net emissions again it’s not just this number out at the end that’s sort of like a running total it’s the area so every time this line jumps those emissions are in the atmosphere

And they stay in the atmosphere they stay driving climate change they make the planet warmer it’s not like they happen and go away they happen and go away they happen and they accumulate and they accumulate and this initial burst of emissions is still in the atmosphere i mean

There’s some decline over a century or two but it’s staying in the atmosphere and it’s driving warming and so again it’s that area above this line that is the ongoing climate warming impact from those emissions if you add up the area below and you add up the area above

You get a very different picture of the climate impact of those two material choices not just by looking at the the final result of a end of life stage uh lca so you know this this i think is really important i think there are a lot of

People in the lca world kind of realizing that that the climate you know we don’t fix the climate by fixating on a number that we’re sort of you know coming up with to represent a material at the end of 60 years 80 years 100 years um that when emissions go into

The atmosphere or when carbon comes out of the atmosphere there is an immediate impact and that impact sort of traces uh over time and it’s not just a um oh i was just going to quickly point out that also you know with biogenic materials there there

Are a way if you look at the sort of arrows out to the side there you know there’s always kind of a default assumption in lca that there’s sort of a worst case scenario or i guess we call it the conventional scenario what’s going to happen to a material that comes

Out of a building and we base those assumptions on what’s happening with those materials today so today 50 of wood waste from buildings in your area ends up in the landfill and 50 is incinerated then that’s the assumption that’s made for the end of life stage of an lca but

I would suggest that you know whether the materials are biogenic or not there’s going to be increasing pressure over time to do more with those materials to try to save them to try to reuse them larry’s presented you you know some really great evidence that

That’s what we need to be doing and i think we’ll see that start to happen and so you know those end of life assumptions are not necessarily you know we’re we’re assuming that today that 60 to 100 years out this is what’s going to happen but i i you know think there’s a

Reasonably good chance that we’re going to be doing better with those materials in which case you know if we’re reusing a lot of the carbon that’s in the the biogenic material from that building or we’re turning it into biochar that the carbon storage is actually going to

Continue you know for a longer period of time possibly indefinitely so that’s another thing to to think about when you’re when you’re looking at lca results okay so this this is not just like oh wouldn’t this be a good idea if we if we you know thought

About carbon this way you know there’s there’s an entire um climate science basis for doing this it’s called ton year accounting um that the notion of it was introduced in the late 1990s and what you’re looking at is sort of a a graph that that summarizes the notion of of time you’re accounting

So in yellow in this graph is you know one ton of co2 emissions that happen and the the sort of the gradual downward slope of that curve is showing that over 100 years that that the climate impact of that that emission sort of diminishes and you can sort of say that

Over 100 years the area represented by this yellow part of the graph means that one ton of emissions today is going to cause 46 ton years of damage of warming to the atmosphere over 100 years so on the flip side of this down here one ton of carbon stored

For you know we sort of bring the the line over in time until the area in blue equals the area in yellow in this case it’s 46 years so what that means is if we can pull a ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the

Atmosphere for about 46 years um there’s definitely debate on whether that’s you know 42 or 53 but you know somewhere in this in this range then you have completely negated a ton of emissions that that occurred at the same time so if you’re looking for you know to say

Like a carbon offset market or something like that one ton of carbon stored in a building since that’s what we’re talking about for 46 years is the equivalent of one ton of carbon uh emitted um over 100 years so the two things are are of equal value

And so if we can keep the carbon in the building longer than 46 years it it’s it’s doing more work than just one time and i’ll show you that on the next slide um but what we’re trying to sort of establish here or what we’re trying to sort of point out is that

Climate science understands the value of time lca practice has not necessarily understood the value of time but if we were thinking about time the way the climate scientists think about time and carbon storage then putting carbon in buildings for you know 50 odd years uh is really meaningful it’s it’s a hundred percent

Offset uh of the same amount of carbon um that that you’ve stored and so you can sort of you know come up with figures to to scale the value of carbon storage um based on this so you know if you store 100 tons of carbon in a building for just one year

It’s the equivalent of 2.17 tons of of carbon uh offset and etc you can sort of multiply it out so you can see highlighted here if you the 46 year time window you store 100 tons you’ve offset 100 tons but if it goes longer so it goes to

80 years your 100 tons of carbon storage has actually done the work of offsetting 174 tons etc as as the time increases the time that you’ve kept that co2 out of the atmosphere the positive impact of it increases as well so um what this also means is that when the

Carbon comes out of a building if it comes out post the 46 50 year window it’s essentially it’s a if whatever it gets emitted is a new emission it’s not it’s not like in the minus one plus one it’s not a continuation of you know the

Old emission it did its work you know it’s completely you know done the work of offsetting a ton of carbon and whatever portion of it comes out you could consider it a new emission and deal with it separately there because it’s it’s essentially negated itself by by being out of

Commission for those 46 years so i hope that’s you know a good enough framing that we can you know start to at least think about why biomass why biogenic building materials have this value that perhaps hasn’t been so well either understood or applied in in building and in lca practice now

Having said all of that forests and timber products are way more difficult to uh to assess in this way um and the reason for that is that right now the the sort of the way we account for um for timber products and and the sort of the emissions associated with them

And the carbon that they store is it’s looking through a pretty narrow window and it may not be capturing uh everything that’s critical to understand so again looking at current lca practice right now for timber products these are the rules by which these things are done is that if

Your wood product is coming from a sustainably managed forest and here you know the iso standard sort of says you know fsc or sfi in north america are considered examples of that then you can count your carbon in the sort of like minus one plus one sort of way

Now what’s weird about that is that neither the forest stewardship council nor the sustainable forestry initiative nor to the best of my knowledge any forestry program actually tracks carbon as part of the certification um so we kind of have this we’re applying this notion that well

They must be doing a pretty good job so we’ll just you know credit them for doing a good job for something that they’re not really doing on the wood side and and wood is really tricky because oh i’m sorry there’s minus one and plus one there’s a lot missing when you think

About analyzing wood in this way so when when you do the life cycle assessment of a timber product a bunch of things don’t show up one is that at around half of the biomass of the tree doesn’t become a carbon storing timber product so

If i cut down a tree to make two by fours about half of the volume of that tree becomes a two by four the other half becomes sawdust becomes force slash becomes something that gets burned by the by the mill to heat the kilns to dry the two by fours but

A a good half of that tree the carbon that was in it goes back to the atmosphere almost instantly so you know we’re saying okay great you know you’ve got you know say a ton of carbon stored in your two by fours in your house but a ton of carbon went into the

Atmosphere to get that ton of carbon into your building so is there any climate value there the answer is probably no but that’s not captured in current lca also not captured is the the volume of root mass so you know typically there’s about 20ish percent of tree biomass is

In the roots and we don’t use that at all in in timber and that material ends up sort of rotting and going back to the atmosphere in various ways fairly quickly so there’s another chunk that we’re not accounting for we don’t account for soil carbon releases from logging

And especially from the erosion that happens after you take out a bunch of trees so those trees have taken not only a bunch of co2 out of the atmosphere to make the tree but they’ve also put a whole bunch into the soil and quite often when we disrupt that system by

Cutting down a bunch of those trees especially by clear-cutting those trees um a whole bunch of that soil carbon goes back to the atmosphere currently not captured in a in a forest timber product lca and the the final factor is that you know there’s this notion well

And i think this is where the you know get wood from sustainably harvested forest park comes in is like well as long as we’re planting as many trees as we’re taking out then the carbon balance will be kind of equal right like i take out a tree i plant a couple trees you

Know i’ve removed some carbon but i’m putting something back in that’s going to store carbon but there’s a a pretty big time gap right a tree takes a long time to grow and so those replanted trees may not start capturing carbon at the rate that the mature tree that you took out is

Going to do for several decades and you know given that the precarious position our climate is in you know cutting down a whole bunch of trees right now and actually adding to carbon emissions in the atmosphere with the hopes that these replanted trees will take that up over the next few decades

Is not going to help our sort of drive to really reduce emissions right now and to and to do the best thing we can for the climate right now so lots to think about uh in the wood space that currently isn’t the the way i guess to best summarize it

Is to say like we’re not going to do anything if we’re making the pool of carbon in our global forests smaller in the trees in the soil um in the in the sort of like supporting biomass that’s in a mature forest if we’re making that smaller while we’re making the pool of

Wooden buildings timber buildings bigger we’re not doing anything for the climate and in fact there’s a good chance we’re doing something worse for the climate so the only way that we can say hey this big timber building i just made we can attribute meaningful carbon storage to that building is if

We made the building and we made the forest carbon stocks bigger at the same time and there are people who will argue that we can’t do that there are people who will argue that we can uh i don’t know enough about forestry to know you know uh

Who’s you know who’s more right but i do know that that you know this this notion that timber buildings are going to save us because you know we can store tons of carbon in our buildings by using timber buildings is not necessarily uh going to be the case currently our current forest practices

Do make this pool smaller while they make the building pool bigger and so there’s no climate benefit to to pursuing that strategy so you might be saying okay so you just told me all this stuff about about you know the climate and meaningful carbon storage and then you

Just told me well forests aren’t you know forest products aren’t that so what are you talking about um what i’m talking about is all the other kinds of biomass that are out there that we could be putting into buildings and that some people are putting into

Buildings and that i think you know my overall argument is that this is the stuff that we need to start getting into buildings and this is the billions and billions of tons of biomass that is fast-growing um often annually renewing and is often um biomass it’s generated as sort of a

Waste product or a byproduct of other industries in particular uh agriculture but also to some degree forestry and also from uh from our waste streams so you know in some fashion or another all of this biomass pulls co2 out of the atmosphere but then puts it it goes back to the atmosphere

Very quickly you know whether that’s by burning crop stubble or you know turning some trees into newspaper and then you know incinerating that or turning cotton into textiles and then you know burying them in landfills whatever it happens to be we sort of have this cycle now of

Generating tons of residue biomass and then letting that the carbon is captured go back to the atmosphere and the the sort of the the thinking that that i have about buildings and that a sort of growing number of people have about buildings is that buildings are an ideal

Way to kind of interrupt that flow so the co2 that we’re putting in buildings as i sort of explained it is or could end up back in the atmosphere but if we’re going to interrupt that cycle if those plants are going to draw billions of tons out of

The atmosphere for us if we can put them into buildings and hold them there for you know by by 10-year accounting 46 years but let’s be more ambitious about the lifespans of our buildings and you know say you know 100 years 200 years interrupt that

Then if they if the carbon goes back to the atmosphere um it’s a new emission later on and it’s done the significant thing that we need to do right now of reducing the amount of co2 in the atmosphere today and tomorrow and like over the next few decades

And so you know there are all kinds of buildings with all kinds of different building materials that are using this kind of residue and waste biomass and that’s what i’m going to sort of focus on and what i hope you kind of leave today uh interested in focusing on as well

So how much of this biomass is there lots is the answer um here’s a study in the u.s that this got studied really really well in the 1990s when um initial sort of thoughts about what do we do about uh co2 and the climate looked at at sort of biomass as

Replacement for thermal energy generation so we were basically saying oh we gotta stop burning fossil fuels but if we burn biomass then you know we’ll offset all that fossil fuel use luckily that thinking is kind of um you know shifting we’re realizing that that just continuing to burn stuff might

Not be a great thing but what we have are all these really great um calculations of how much biomass was out there so you know in the in the us you can see that um egg residues uh wastes um make up a significant point and they’re they’re also looking at how much

Uh could be generated if you actually planted crops sort of intentional crops to uh to create biomass but however you slice it up and the three different bars here um these are sort of three different estimates based on the same data so um this one is sort of like a

A government sponsored moderate case scenario here’s like their best case scenario and here’s the union of concerned scientists looked at that data set and said well maybe you’re being a bit you know ambitious you know we think it’s more like this um but even still it’s you know in the hundreds of

Millions of dry tons of of this material um available and you know this this this kind of figure uh plays out around the world too like without having to involve ourselves in massive land use change or cutting down forests we have literally millions and billions of tons of biomass

That could be available for making things like building materials where that carbon gets stored durably so let’s take for example a favorite material of mine which is grain straw there are all kinds of people making all kinds of interesting building products and buildings out of grain straw

But just to give you a sense of scale over 2 billion tons of grain straw are grown every year to give us the sort of the wheat the oats the barley the rye the rice you know we eat the grains that these things grow and they all leave a

Stock that that we don’t eat and nobody eats and is either burned or drowned or in some way gets back into the atmosphere very quickly so we’re already planting we’re already growing and we’re literally already collecting over 2 billion tons of grain straw that 2 billion tons of grain straw

Contains 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide that was drawn out of the atmosphere to grow those plants if we could capture that and put it in say buildings that would be drawing down the equivalent of india’s uh ghgs annually for material that’s already growing and material that’s already being planted

Material we already have access to and material we already know how to make materials and buildings out of um so you know there’s people making straw sip panels there’s people making blown insulation out of straw there’s people making compressed um interior partition wall panels insulation blocks acoustic

Panels like all kinds of things and and also people making now quite large buildings you know five thousand square meter plus public buildings um you know here are the the straw bale panels being made for uh for this school in france for for example so you know this isn’t

Uh sci-fi this isn’t sort of futuristic this isn’t you know wouldn’t it be nice if this is something that you know people are already doing and if we put our minds to it it’s not a big technical leap um to to figure out how to do this so

I’ve been doing a lot of work at the residential building scale that’s kind of my focus and in the last couple of years have sort of run over 700 sample homes kind of as built homes from around north america uh through through calculations and to date the the sort of average is

Somewhere between sort of 200 and 250 kilograms of emissions per square meter of floor area for a low-rise residential building so 241 was the average uh when i when i made this graphic so there it is there’s a sort of typical scenario um of our of our small buildings

At the rate that we’re building those small buildings right now that’s 54 million tons of emissions a year that’s the the emissions that would come from 15 coal-fired power plants and we’re adding that to the atmosphere annually while making the materials to make just our low-rise residential buildings in the u.s

On the flip side if we did the kinds of swaps that we know are possible and we know they’re possible because we can see example buildings like them i’ll show you a couple uh in a minute that we can get that figure um to somewhere in the

Neighborhood of 130 140 kilograms of net storage because of all these biogenic materials uh per square meter of building if we can get from where we are now to there it would we would be next storing 36 million tons of of co2 annually by making our residential buildings so we can go from

Adding 15 coal plants worth of emissions to removing 10 that’s the difference of 25 coal-fired power plants that we can get from this place to that place which is a huge intervention in terms of um you know the impact on the climate the single biggest climate impact in my

Country has been when the province of ontario shut down four coal-fired power plants absolutely changed the country’s um ghg emissions and that’s four plants and we’re talking the potential for just in the u.s um by changing it by the equivalent of 25 coal plants so this is this is not like

You know if you look at it on a one building by one building basis it’s like oh you know does this really make a difference but yes it does um when we look at it at the scale that we’re currently building and here in north america we’re building a lot less

Than in other parts of the world you know this this this comparison gets exaggerated if you start looking at uh at developing countries if you start looking at you know india if you start looking at the sort of the the building stats for china uh of what’s predicted

For africa um this just this gets way more intense and exaggerated so either it gets more intense and exaggerated on the emission side or we work hard to intervene and make it you know even more dramatic on the storage side so i’m just going to quickly uh show you

Some examples of larger buildings i know you know because of my my own practice my own focus is in is in low-rise buildings that quite often people get the sense like oh that’s sweet and cute like uh you can do this with little buildings but you can’t necessarily do

It with big buildings so i’m just gonna show you some examples they’re all from uh europe of places that are um you know taking these notions taking these types of materials and making large buildings out of them so here’s the the school in france um that i showed you a couple slides back

This one is really great this is a a major insulation retrofit of a community center sports center in the netherlands using compressed straw chopped straw blown in to to be the insulation for this really large 2500 square meter retrofit here’s a a business park in the uk made with prefab strawbale wall panels

Here’s a markson spencer store in the uk made with prefab hemp creek panels and a mass timber frame here’s a a building at the university of nottingham also in the uk made with prefab straw bale panels here’s a seven story apartment building in france also made with a timber frame and prefab

Straw bale panels here’s the enterprise center in east anglia uk um that’s using a whole bunch of biogenic materials but but really interestingly these prefabricated thatch panels as the exterior cladding so that’s kind of taking a a very old and very traditional way of both roofing and siding buildings in northern europe and

And kind of turning it into something that that works um for for larger buildings and at kind of like a a mass scale and now this is a building that it’s smaller in scale but this is one that i can talk about a little bit more in

Depth because uh i was really involved in this building this one is a new classroom at trent university in the city of peterborough ontario where i’m from and they needed a new forensic crime scene building for for their forensics department and so they were really interested in making this a

A net zero uh building they were initially interested in making it a net zero emissions building on the operations side which you know i’m obviously a huge fan of that’s what we need to be doing and they they were doing it through the ilf eyes zero carbon buildings certification program

But when they asked for our involvement um i said well sure you know we can make a net zero emissions building but how about we also try to make uh the materials net zero emissions uh as well and so they were interested and uh joined the design team

And so we suggested a number of material substitutions to get there um one being using foam glass gravel for the insulation under the slab so you can see in this photo here this is made from the recycled glass that nobody knows what to do with that we

Have mountains of all over the world it sort of puffs it into into a foam glass that is both structural and insulative so it replaces the gravel you would usually put under a building’s slab but also the often the foam insulation that would go there it’s not a carbon

Storing material but it has a very very small carbon footprint especially compared to foam insulations we made the the exterior walls of the building out of this load-bearing hem creep block system from a company called just bio-fiber we also used hemp fat insulation on the insides of those walls and all the sound

Separator walls we used some wood fiberboard insulation on the upper portions of the building we selected the best available low carbon concrete mix that that the regional concrete suppliers could offer and we also used a local mill that makes a charred wood siding for uh for some of

The exterior of the building those are the key changes so not not that many changes to the uh to the overall you know building plan but you can see we had they already had a base case building sort of set up because they were going to build this differently

So when we calculated the footprint of the materials for their base case building this building was going to have over 211 tons of emissions associated with making the materials it was going to be concrete block and spray foam um were the sort of like you know main structural materials for the walls it

Was going to have a metal framed roof and either spray foam or mineral wool in the ceilings so anyway all of that you know added up was 211 tons as built with the carbon low carbon materials and the carbon storing materials that we applied we got that

Down to 25 tons so that’s an 88 reduction and then we also calculated it what if we were calculating the carbon storage value of the timber we use in here because we did go out of our way to try to find as much locally sourced really sustainably harvested locally milled wood um

So again we don’t know that that that we’re doing the right thing so we you know we aren’t counting on these numbers but just to show you know if we’re doing wood right then we can actually get this building down into internet carbon storing territory just slightly so

You know but but dropping the carbon footprint of these materials by almost 90 percent uh is pretty major and so now when we say hey this is a zero carbon building what we’re talking about is zero carbon operationally so it’s all electric uh the grid in this part of the

World is pretty clean to start with and all of its grid use is being offset by the solar panels on the roof so you know for the foreseeable feature the building’s not going to contribute to climate change in its operations and its materials depending on how we want

To calculate it either had only a very tiny carbon footprint or they were slightly carbon storing but either way you know now we can sort of say if we put those two things together operational emissions and material emissions what’s the footprint of the building and the answer for this building is it’s

You know minimal or nothing or slightly uh slightly carbon storing but this is the kind of approach that’s going to actually get the built environment to be carbon neutral at least in the sort of time frame we want and we can’t sort of just say let’s just focus

On the operations and you know if every small building like this is responsible for 200 plus tons of emissions while it’s being made it really doesn’t matter so much how bad the operating emissions are you’ve already blown your carbon budget before you know you’ve even started operating

The building so you know we’re trying to think about these things together and make sure that when we say this is a zero carbon building that we’re actually talking about a zero carbon building so another project i’ll show you just to wrap up uh we built this with our students in 2017

We called it zero house because we were you know really intentionally setting out to have a zero carbon footprint building both operationally and on the material side as well as including zero toxins in the materials and and having uh the building responsible for zero waste as well

So we built one unit of what the design team had um figured as a sort of stackable row house so this was a group at ryerson university making a proposal for uh the end of a city block in downtown toronto um and so we were looking for a project to

Do and so you know we thought that we could sort of give them an example of how this could work not just in a sort of you know prefab and energy efficient way which were their goals but in bringing this sort of notion of carbon storage to the table as well

So we essentially made the building off-site so we really wanted to not just make a prefab building we wanted to make a prefab building that you could put together and take apart and put together and take apart uh and in doing so talk you know

Earlier on i was saying you know if we can extend the lifespan of this carbon in buildings beyond the lifespan of one building then you know we extend the the carbon thus the value of storing that carbon and so we were seeing a lot of people doing interesting things with prefab

But nobody was planning on making their prefab buildings to take down again and we really wanted to go about it that way so to challenge ourselves we decided to make the panels assemble the building in our hometown of peterborough uh let people see it take it down put it up at

A design show in toronto ontario let people see it take it down and then sell it to a client and put it up on their property so in our little flying factory we built floor panels wall panels and roof panels mostly with wood framing and using different types of carbon storage insulation

So a lot of the wall panels had straw bales in them uh others had cellulose insulation they all had uh rewall which is a recycled uh drinking box juice box uh wall board and uh wood fiber board sheathing which is like a a structural exterior insulated sheathing

So that the panels were kind of loaded with uh with waste biomass carbon storage we did a few experimental things like sheath some of the panels with microfoam which is a mycelium-based insulation we grew kind of in situ uh on several of the panels just to uh to give that a try

Worked really well that’s a material i’m i’m really excited about in terms of uh being able to make building materials that um you know get us completely outside of the notion of like you go out into nature and you like harvest things and and then you shake them and and

And turn them into products and instead looking at how can we actually grow the materials that we need it was really exciting to pull the cover off of these panels uh four or five days after we uh inoculated them and see that we had this incredible fireproof highly thermally resistant

Moisture resistant uh insulation that sort of grew uh all on its own so we we put uh the panels up this is they’re going up for the second time uh it’s really quick we can assemble the entire structure floor walls and roof in the day

We also wanted to make sure that we were thinking not only just about the structure as being removable and and going up and going down but also the interior exterior finishes so on the interior we used a lot of pre-finished plywood with really attractive surface mounted screws so that you know

Everything could go up but everything can also come down at any point in the future history of this building if somebody wants to rewire or you know make alterations it’s easy to pull off whichever pieces of plywood you need to get back into the service cavity we did some

Demountable plaster walls as well on the right you can see a sort of shiny red cadillac plaster so that was in the hallways and in the in the bathroom so you know the floors uh the flooring traveled with the panels and you can sort of see that there’s a piece of

Hardwood flooring running the the opposite way um that’s the seams and that’s how we that’s how we handle that so you know in all facets of the building really trying to figure out how to make sure that all the materials are uh are reusable and uh and can be taken down and put

Back up again you can see on the exterior that meant we used steel cladding which from a carbon footprint point of view uh you know was definitely a penalty to the overall carbon footprint but it made a whole lot of sense in terms of being able to mount and dismount an exterior finish

Repeatedly so when we tallied up the carbon footprint uh of this house net our net carbon storage was 25 tons so that’s you know even taking the metal siding and the metal roofing and all those things into account the carbon storage in the biogenic materials offset all of those

Uh to the tune of 25 tons and a house of this size built conventionally would have added about 45 tons of emissions through the contribution of its materials so you know uh this was a really great project to kind of show not only that this can be done uh making carbon storm

Buildings but that it can be done in a in a sort of like efficient and and prefabricated way and in a way that that doesn’t generate a lot of waste at the end of the building’s life too and just as a side note it’s not a necessarily

Related to the carbon footprint as we calculated it but those three bags of garbage is all that was generated in the production of that house every other material was recyclable so it was we were very proud to send only about 20 pounds of waste to the landfill rather than the typical 8

000 pounds from from a canadian new home so i’m gonna wrap up um by basically you know inviting you to to be bold and and be radical in your approach to the built environment and its carbon footprint you know i hope that i’ve showed you enough examples of buildings

At all kinds of scales that people who are dedicated to the notion of building this way of doing these kinds of calculations of taking the notion of biomass buildings seriously they’re making serious buildings and they’re doing it really well and and it’s potentially transformative for the entire practice of architecture and

For the global climate i’m sure somewhere along the line you’ve seen the impact that buildings have globally on our climate and what i would like us to think about is not just like chipping away at that by by incrementally reducing i want to see us flip that paradigm completely and you

Know i would like to invite you to be part of doing that you know you can make these kinds of buildings you can advocate for them work on them design them help get them funded whatever you know whatever piece of this is is yours to take on um that that you you know

Take the climate crisis seriously and and really you know give it your all to to do this thing where where we can flip this around um and become like actually the building industry a source of really massive carbon storage instead of one of the driving main driving factors of climate change

So a sort of off-the-cuff action plan uh having seen this and and hopefully you know you being excited about this now um filled with plants uh built with plants that ideally also build soil so we didn’t really talk much about that but you know if the biomass that we’re using

In buildings is grown in such a way that we’re also retaining the carbon that those plants put into the soil instead of just tilling it up and releasing it we’re kind of going to get a double bonus and i didn’t talk about that because it’s it’s a difficult one to

Account for but it’s meaningful and it’s it potentially you know doubles or triples the impact of a biomass building if if the carbon that that plant you built with stays in the soil um there can be as much or more carbon in the soil than there is in the in the biomass

That you built with fix what we have i know that larry has talked to you about that you know if we can not expend so much embodied carbon on making new buildings the ones that are there the carbon’s already in the atmosphere and i would add to that by saying fix

What we have again using these biogenic materials if we can be insulating buildings wrapping buildings cladding buildings flooring buildings putting dividing walls and buildings if we can do all of that with biomass those those retrofits also have the potential to be massive stores of carbon 2. think about where your materials are

Coming from and how you get them um you know there’s a danger you know from a quick presentation like this and just thinking like oh biomass is great let’s just you know take every bit of biomass and jam it into a building you know there there are

Ways to do that well and there are ways to do that that will just you know continue a cycle of poor land management and bad farming practices and you know all kinds of wasteful and destructive behaviors so you know please think about a deep dive into you know where these materials are

Coming from and how they arrive uh at your building site there’s a lot that we can do right now with current technology you know the the buildings that we can make i showed you a bunch of them um really simple materials like cellulose insulation and wood fiberboard insulation and linoleum flooring you

Know there’s a whole bunch of things out there right now that we’ve used for decades that have good track records that are affordable they’re available and that store carbon so use those and you know be encouraging of exploring co-partnering with you know the people who are are making better stuff

We really need to change the codes and get everybody educated um i’m really heartened by the amount of codes work that that’s starting to happen on the embodied carbon front here in canada our prime minister just charged natural resources canada which is which is the um the department responsible for energy

Efficiency in buildings with making a new building code that aligns with the country’s climate targets by 2024. that you know couldn’t have imagined that change coming around uh that quickly even a couple of years ago and i i see you know similar pushes happening with the the international

Code council in the u.s so um anything that we can do to support those efforts whether it’s just writing to those bodies and saying yay like good for you keep going you know this is what we want to actually joining them and helping out learning how to count carbon and what

The numbers mean you know this presentation gave you a uh the quick 15-minute intro into you know how to think about biomass and carbon storage in buildings but there are all kinds of tools and accounting softwares out there lots of which don’t think about carbon

Storage or think about it in some of the limited ways that i pointed out so you know if you are starting to learn lca tools question those tools question the people that made those tools question the results you’re seeing and you know think about them in terms of uh the time value

Of that carbon and be sure that as you’re coming up with results you’re coming up with results that that you feel represent uh the way that the climate is being impacted build relationships of mutual aid with people beyond profit you know there’s a lot of people who make a

Living making these types of buildings and making these materials but we’re also doing it um because we have to and we want to and because we find that the the relationships that we establish as we as we find mentors as we find colleagues as we find clients that that all of those um

Both you know help us get to our climate storing goals with buildings but also reward us and and make this all possible to do personally build understanding of and relationships with ecological cycles that’s in some ways a a a repeat of number one and number three here but you know

We need to get beyond you know the notion of building materials as something that that we like look at a website or look at an order sheet and say you know that one um to really you know having a clear sense of who’s involved what are they doing how does it happen

You know how are they treating people how are they treating the planet what are the climate impacts beyond that the numbers that i see um on an environmental product declaration i think that’s that’s all really important and last but definitely not least um you know there is incredible urgency to do this you

Know that it’s exciting to see the handful of buildings i just showed you that are that are great carbon storing buildings and we need to get every building looking like that in the next 10 to 20 years and so it’s urgent that that we do this it’s it’s you know

It’s beyond the point of like you know you have one or two of these projects on the back burner you know stewing away while you’re kind of doing your other work we need to make doing it this way uh everything we do quickly um and to and to still

And to want to do it and to love doing it and to you know really embrace doing it um i think personally i i i can’t tell you how much energy and joy as well as you know some some good moments of despair uh but come from come

From really diving into this and really you know making this the focus of what i do and i hope there’s some encouragement between uh what you’ve heard from anne and very and now myself to do this yourself so i want to thank you for inviting me to talk and i’m looking forward to

Chatting with you live when the when the q a comes up okay bye all right so you’ve heard about how to reduce reduce embodied carbon using lower carbon materials and how to eliminate it and store carbon using carbon sequestering materials chris and the carbon leadership forum

And a lot of others are really working on these kinds of reinventing rethinking materials and how we build which is really exciting and really has to happen as chris said we have about 10 years to completely change the way we think about and use materials there’s another way to eliminate

Embodied carbon and that is to use fewer materials in the first place the easiest way to use fewer materials is to reuse the buildings and materials we already have the built environment is not just a potential carbon sink it’s a huge carbon bank reusing buildings including renovating and upgrading them

Results in about 50 to 75 percent less embodied emissions than building a new one and makes it possible to build fewer new ones the other huge benefit from reusing buildings is that if you make them more efficient and all electric you can reduce and eliminate operating emissions from all our existing buildings which

Account for the majority of emissions from buildings here’s how emissions break down for new and existing buildings and i’m going to preface this by saying that this is for the u.s and we build a lot less in the us than we build in a lot of the rest of

The world that’s rapidly developing so this embodied bar in the center would go up a lot for the global picture in the us we built about four we built about four billion square feet two thirds residential and one-third commercial in 2018. the emissions from operating that four billion square feet is somewhere between

10 and 20 million tons a year depending on how efficient they are the emissions to build that is about 150 million metric tons but the emissions from operating the 340 billion square feet of buildings we already have is just under 2 billion tons so for new buildings as chris has

Said we really need to focus on eliminating embodied emissions for existing buildings we need to work on eliminating operating emissions reusing and upgrading buildings addresses both of these reusing buildings makes it possible to build fewer new ones which brings down in body emissions upgrading them brings down the operating

Emissions and if we can use biogenic carbon storing materials in our renovations we can turn existing buildings into carbon sinks as well i’m going to show you a little case study that we did a carbon study after it was done we did a study of this building we

Weren’t the architects for this building it’s a net positive office renovation for dpr construction in san francisco and it illustrates how important operational savings are and embodied the project resulted in about 70 percent less embodied emissions than a new building would have produced reused materials were shown hatched here include the

Structure the slab on grade cast concrete exterior walls and the historic aluminum curtain wall windows and mullions so the solid bars are the new materials that went into the building the hatched bars are what we saved and it’s about a 70 reduction which is pretty significant but here’s the deal the embodied carbon

Compared to a new building was about 650 tons of savings which was significant because it happened up front when the project was first done but over the next 20 years eliminating gas adding efficiency upgrades and pvs will yield far greater savings than avoided operating emissions so

You got to do it all you got to do the embodied emissions which saves emissions right up front which is where we really need to save it but then you have to keep the and by the operating emissions down and get them to zero and this one this actually is a net positive

Building it produces more energy than they use so it goes back to the grid but it’s not easy to convince people to reuse buildings developers and architects like shiny new things and we still need new buildings there are also a whole lot of variables to consider what if you can only improve

The performance of an existing building by 50 but you can replace it with a net zero building how do climate zone grid efficiency and time affect those calculations we haven’t had a simple tool that could compare all of those variables i’ve been working with erin mcdate of architecture 2030 and lori ferris of

Goody clancy architects in boston to develop a tool that compares all of the carbon emissions operating embodied and avoided for different existing new and reused scenarios this is not a design tool it’s a tool for planners building owners and developers to understand the carbon impacts of their decisions and to evaluate whether

To renovate or upgrade and upgrade or build a new building here’s how it works you enter data about the existing building including location which automatically establishes your climate zone and grid efficiency you define the type of replacement building you need and the type of upgraded needs you define the extent of the building

Retrofit you set efficiency targets for the new and the new uh and retrofit scenarios and it gives you the embodied operating emissions for each up each option you can see emissions over a specific time frame selected in this case i think it was ten years

Uh and you can see that the existing do nothing building just leave it alone let it keep operating retrofit that existing building to a certain efficiency standard or um the new building and you can see that in this case for this particular was one of our projects we did right near the

Berkeley campus uh it was far less to retrofit and upgrade mostly in embodied savings for that it was developed in excel we’re currently converting it into an open access web-based app we’re also working on versions that will allow cities and developers to evaluate whole portfolios of buildings because

This isn’t just about single buildings it’s about reusing and upgrading thousands and millions of buildings a number of tools out there that can help you understand track and reduce embodied carbon databases give you carbon emissions per kilogram of material so those are useful just to sort of take a quick look at

Different materials carbon calculators track total embodied carbon emissions for buildings and building assemblies based on quantity material quantities and there are a few more in the works including the care tool that i just showed you an epic tool which is by ehd architects which is coming out soon and chris’s

Chris’s tool which is the beam calculator which is the only one that currently tracks and calculates carbon storing materials we’re hoping to add those kinds of options into the care and epic tools as well but they’re not there yet so i’m going to go through my action

Plan and if chris isn’t here we can uh we can hope we can go back to that if we want or we can um just talk through it so as you might expect the top of my list is to care for and improve what we have to reuse and upgrade existing buildings

But second on my list is what it was chris is doing which is to shift our material economy to carbon storing materials more immediately we need to use less concrete and build with low carbon concrete we use more concrete than any other material in the world and accounts for

Over eight percent of global emissions is just from concrete so concrete a lot of people are working on concrete we really need to keep working on it and get rid of it and make it better choose the lowest carbon alternatives for all materials which includes recycled content materials and salvaged materials

We need to maximize structural and material efficiency we need to just use fewer materials in general and finally for for me reuse is also about it’s it’s about caring that’s why we named the tool that caring for the people and communities who live and work most people live in existing buildings

Not the new buildings we’re building today so we really need to start treating our existing built environment not just as carbon sinks and ways to save carbon but as ways to make communities uh better and serve people better so let’s see i don’t know if chris is on

Do you know if he’s joined us in i don’t know ian not not at the moment not yet we’re crazy okay i mean we can either just show this or we can go back to that and hear him talk about all this because he’s got something to say about all these points

Which what do you want to do we have time to go back or should we just why don’t we go ahead and um take some questions for you larry while we’re giving chris a few minutes to sort of wrangle through the technologies okay all right i can leave this up and then

When chris joins us he can just talk to his his action plan his points which have some of the same things he’s got some bigger um bigger picture things like changing the codes and all those things which are clearly really important so all right all right so

Ian are we do we take a show of hands or how are we managing the questions um we can go through some of the ones in the chat that maybe haven’t been addressed yet and then we can go by show of hands okay i kind of think we got let’s see here’s one

Um okay michael what’s the current cost difference of building a carbon negative typical residential building are there projections i assume you mean as opposed to a conventional building and are there projections on what this cost differential would be if materials are mass produced at high scale and practices were widespread

Yeah chris really should answer this question but i can say that that chris is building his his smaller scale buildings now at really no cost difference at all the only the only caveat i would say to some of the materials that he talks about is that they’re not

As readily available yet as the truth you can’t go to home depot and buy all those straw panels so they take a little more searching for so i would say the extra cost and onus is right now on the architects and the specifiers to find the materials but in

Terms of actually purchasing them and working with them it uh it doesn’t really cost any more right now chris has done a lot of these buildings and it and it should be eventually i would think cheaper than relying on a scarce resource that’s disappearing which is oil

Yeah i i’d like to take this opportunity to to make a point i like to make as frequently as i can which is that whenever we talk about whether there’s a cost premium something to something we have to go back to the assumptions of a project right what were the goals of

The project and if the goals of a project are to create something that’s extremely low in carbon or carbon positive then it’s a question not of um is it going to cost extra but how are you going to meet your budget and do that right we make many many many design choices

In creating a building and if your goals are to achieve a particular performance objective then you need to figure out how to do that within budget and um what’s really gratifying to me is i’ve been harping on this for many many years and oh i guess starting maybe about five or

Six years ago several large architectural firms and engineering firms actually did studies where they demonstrated that that was the case that there really isn’t a premium for example to a lead platinum building when that’s the case or our living building challenge because you have to meet the goal my favorite

Very simple example is if somebody comes to you and says well we want to remodel our kitchen you say well would you like a sink with that well yeah of course it’s a kitchen it needs a sink right it it’s not optional so it’s a question of what you deem to

Be optional and what you deem to be necessary in a project and i think we we are all we’re beyond the point where we need to see saving carbon as necessary um end of homily for the moment yeah yeah sure like i said never miss the opportunity

To get on that particular soapbox yeah um let’s see robin is there a way to put these ideas into a general plan update oh gosh that’s another favorite question of mine um thanks yeah i live in petaluma where we’re in the midst of a general plan

Update as a matter of fact and i’m talking to some of my um colleagues up here including one who’s on the line today about how we might do that and so i’ve been kicking around this idea for a while of creating a carbon budget for a city that’s based on sort of a

What is the livable planet allocation of our carbon emissions how would we um uh distribute that over the next eight years in order to achieve the town’s carbon neutrality goal of or by 2030 and then decide well how are we going to allocate that to the buildings that need to be built and

Renovated which is a bit of a high bar but again it’s like we have to decide what’s necessary so and then to build that mechanism into our general plan update so this is by no means a done deal but this is the wild hair we’re working on up here in petaluma and

Um i would certainly encourage you to get in touch with me if you want to help with this project so i will put my email into the chat and the only the only thing i would add to that is is for general plans if cities could start to a

Include embodied carbon in their calculations which aren’t currently in their calculations at all and include what berkeley’s working on um they want the first city to ban gas for new construction they’re now working on trying to retrofit the entire city off of gas which is a huge undertaking but it’s

Where we have to go so starting to have your city start to look at both the embodied end by saying this is these are actually missions even though those embodied missions may not have been produced in our county because the materials came from somewhere else we have to count them because we’re using

The materials and then and then at the same time sort of saying you know going to net zero emissions on all our buildings and existing buildings is the tricky thing for for general plans because they generally address a lot of new construction new codes we have to figure out a way

To start to get all of our existing buildings to zero on that same timeline or maybe a few years after but not much after because that’s where most of the emissions are coming from is existing buildings not not new buildings absolutely and andy’s pointed out in the

Chat that san luis obispo public works is exploring low-carbon concrete standards for new infrastructure projects right on yeah infrastructure is a huge consumer of or producer of co2 emissions and this is waiting to get in there he is okay good oh great chris you’re with us now maybe chris hello we’ll see yeah

Um i’m just wondering if he’s in but muted maybe not okay anyway so perhaps we can have one more question while we wait for chris to be with us in voice so let’s see what else do we have up here in the chat um it looks like chris has connected to

Audio are you with us chris oh there you go am i coming through yes yes hooray all right so chris your action plan is on the slide next to larry’s side by side larry do you want to walk him through that yeah we moved your action plan out of

Your slides and put it as the last slide so if you are willing i talked through my action plan and if you would be willing to talk through your action plan and then we’ll take some more questions because i thought it was a great close to your presentation we wanted to close the

Whole presentation okay uh hang on let me just get it large enough that i can read it there we go uh-oh i can read them to you okay um so Yeah i mean it’s it’s uh very much based on the notion of you know how we work with biomass and so you know point number one is uh build with plants that build soil and i led with that because i didn’t really address that in in the presentation part

But there’s a whole other part to building with biomass where the if we grow the plants well as much carbon will end up in the soil as ends up in the plant matter and our sort of lca methodologies don’t really have a great way of accounting for that but

Um i think it’s sort of an important thing to think about as we think about biomass and sourcing biomass and using biomass that we that we’re aware that there’s this whole other component where we can either grow biomass in a way that that sort of

Takes carbon out of the soil and puts it back into the atmosphere with lots of tilling and sort of conventional practices or we can harvest biomass where we’re intentionally getting carbon back into the soil at the same time point two is to fix what we have which i think is

Uh you know what you covered probably uh very well larry to you know think about not building new uh unless we have to focusing on where materials come from and how we get them related i guess to the first point about building plant with plants that build

Soil but but more broadly you know thinking about labor practices and you know supply chains and all of those things that go into getting uh materials to buildings and you know doing our best to make sure that the whole you know the whole sort of ecosystem of getting

Materials is is healthy and good for everybody doing what we can with current technology because there are lots of things that we can do that are either low carbon or carbon storing today and then you know as i sort of showed in the presentation part you know lots of new things coming

Um things that are available but in small quantities or you’d have to actually you know track it down and things that are still in r d but but um always keeping our eye towards you know what else is coming uh changing codes and educating everybody quickly i guess that’s what

We’re all here for today it is really great to see what’s going on with codes and and climate uh much faster than i thought would happen here in canada our prime minister just um gave a directive to national natural resources canada which is sort of the buildings energy efficiency branch of the government

That we need an entire new building code based on our climate commitments by 2024 and you know that’s that’s something i would never have imagined coming along as quickly as it did but um and it seems like there’s you know interesting things happening at the icc level in the us so

Um that’s great learning how to count carbon and what the numbers mean is my next part of the action plan which is uh you know sort of what i was trying to cover a little bit in the in the presentation build relationships of mutual aid with people beyond profit um

This is you know i put that there because we can all make a living doing this really great building and design work for the climate but but that you know if that’s all we’re doing it for and and we’re not pursuing relationships and and support of everybody involved

We’re going to kind of replicate a lot of the same problems that we’ve we’ve already created uh build understanding of and relationships with ecological cycles um i guess encompasses you know a lot of some of the first points so i’ll jump to the last one which is uh act with great

Urgency tremendous passion and abundant joy um and that’s because there’s a lot that we need to do uh it needs to be done quickly and you know we need to feel um sort of yeah joy and exuberance and and excitement at being able to uh to tackle this pretty huge issue

Thanks thanks chris i i that last point is so important because for me uh even with the work that i do i you get overwhelmed by reading the news and reading what’s happening and the way to not get overwhelmed is to act is to do stuff it keeps me

Sane uh actually by by continuing to find ways and strategies to to reverse what’s happening and i think i think we still can and i think that’s how you that’s how you don’t go i have a lot of people that just get totally depressed when i try to

Talk about climate with them and this and the way to not get depressed is to do stuff yeah yeah i totally agree with that too and um in fact i have a a no news policy [Laughter] you know somehow the news finds its way to me anyway but it’s like i don’t want

To read it i don’t want to hear it just like keep me focused on solutions right so uh chris thank you so much i’m so glad you were able to drop in for this uh q a part of the session and so folks um can we should we do hands

Race because i think we have run through all the questions in the chat we can actually unmute people to have them express their questions viva voce right and should i stop sharing and then we can just go to see everybody sure yeah all right i think there is one

The one from michael um that we didn’t get addressed that we referred to chris on did they we tried to answer it without chris oh right sure we can go back to that and then andy has one too so um chris michael asked what’s the current cost difference building a carbon negative

Typical residential building versus conventional and are their projections on what the cost differential would be if the materials are mass-produced at scale and the practices were widespread um well the answer to the first one is is relatively simple in that um you know there are quite a few

Practitioners here in canada and i’m sure in the us who are already doing buildings residential buildings at sort of you know carbon neutral or carbon storing at market rates right now so there’s there’s not necessarily any cost difference what what i found i did a study for for natural resources canada and

We found no correlation between the carbon footprint of a material and its cost so sometimes the the material with the best carbon profile was the cheapest sometimes it was the most expensive sometimes it was mid-range and vice versa sometimes the one with the highest carbon footprint

Was also the most expensive or it could be the cheapest like it’s not really an indicator um it’s not one of those things where oh because it’s low carbon or carbon storing it’s therefore more expensive it’s kind of all over the map um and to the second part i can only assume

You know the way that it’s happened with you know pretty much everything in our supply chain solar comes to mind you know solar was always going to be way too expensive nobody was going to be able to afford solar until suddenly we needed enough of it that it’s now the cheapest form of

Energy production available so you know i think if we’re serious about producing materials that store carbon we can you know we will find that they’re they’re very affordable um you know at heart it’s taking you know leftover material that’s already being harvested and treating it pretty minimally like in general it’s there’s

Not a lot there’s not a lot of chemical transformation there’s not a lot of heat based transformation so you know they should be the types of materials that we can produce you know in quantity really affordably great um andy you’re up great thank you so much this has been a

Fabulous presentation i really appreciate the um the examples and i feel like a lot of the reluctance on trying some of these materials are what if there’s a fail right so it’s one thing in kind of an educational project but if we you know client is paying us for their great

Building and we’re trying some new product that maybe we’re not familiar with so i’m just wondering if when you have any stories to share um because it’s always good for those lessons learned but also um if you have um uh kind of a heads up or a process that

You use to kind of discern materials that you’re going to be bringing on you know whether it’s a a hemp create creed or a fiber board or you know something that’s maybe not as familiar well i think in in my own practice the thing that we’ve sort of realized

And and often don’t touch on it in the presentations is that there’s also a real building science benefit to to working with biological materials if if you’re aware that that’s what you’re doing and you do it well um all of our wall systems for example are

Sort of vapor open wall systems so we’re making airtight buildings but we’re not using any plastic sheet barriers or anything like that and the interesting part about that is the the resilience of the building and the danger of issues seems to go way down you know after

25 years in the business i have yet to see you know a straw based building or a hemp-based building or a cellulose-based building that has any of the issues that people are worried about them having unless somebody’s done something you know not smart from a building science point

Of view like put a vapor barrier in the wrong place or you know i guess that’s pretty much the only the only uh real issue that ever crops up and so if you if you sort of have your building science wits about you the fact that these materials are able to

Sort of absorb moisture and release it again to either side of an assembly makes them really um resilient to to all kinds of conditions you know when when conditions change from hot to cold or you know from dry to humid they actually perform incredibly well

Yeah the only thing i would add to that i agree with that completely is just the only thing to think about a lot of modern materials like foams and things like that are kind of impervious to water and bio-based materials are not so it’s not just the breathability and the moisture is

Something they do very well they don’t do well with actually direct waters you just have to be really careful in detailing the building to shed the water away from the material itself and then they then they’re great and probably better than all the materials we’re using now

That makes a lot of sense thank you great do we have other questions seeing any other hands if not i have some questions for chris chris on one of your slides where you’re showing sort of a an array of um bio-based materials beside this i believe it’s a french school

One of your captions reads 2.16 billion tons of grain straw annually equals 4 billion tons of co2 drawdown and i’m curious about how that sort of 2x math comes about how do you get twice as much co2 as there is in the mass of the straw

Um well that’s you you get that by photosynthesis so it draws four billion tons of of co2 out of the atmosphere and then the plant lets the oxygen go um and retains the carbon so when it when it’s drawing co2 out of the atmosphere it has the the

The the sort of atomic weight of one carbon and two oxygens and then when the plant does its photosynthetic magic the the oxygen goes back to the atmosphere um thank you plants for giving us something to breathe and the carbon stays in the in the material so like quite often

In in lcas like you just you keep working in co2 so because when the carbon comes out of that plant material whether by you know burning or decomposition most of it is going to recombine with oxygen so it’s going to turn back into co2 so if it’s drawing 4 billion tons down if

You burnt all of that straw you’d be putting essentially 4 billion tons of co2 back into the atmosphere um so what you’re seeing is sort of the difference between the weight of the material which is you know the carbon and the other things that that make up the plant stem

Versus co2 as the as the greenhouse gas that we’re discussing got it thank you that’s really helpful and is that roughly the same um equation for other biogenic materials or do they vary considerably no pretty much all dry biomass is somewhere between like the high 30s to

The low 50 percent carbon content so they do vary by you know 10 15 percent but but sort of roughly speaking you know most people use if it’s wood they use 50 and if it’s straw and other sort of egg biomass it’s like 40 to 45 percent

Of the weight of the biomass is carbon from the atmosphere okay great that’s really helpful um we also had a question earlier from judy asking about the equivalency per the iso standard of fsc versus sfi and for those unfamiliar with the acronyms fsc is forest stewardship council sfi is sustainable forestry initiative and

There has been a long raging debate about the equivalency or non-equivalency of those two standards so my latest intelligence is not all that recent but at the time i last looked at it fsc was still held by forest advocates to be considerably superior sort of across the board in terms of

Environmental and sustainability parameters to sfi do you have recent intel on this issue um yes and no um sfi has also i don’t know if they’ve if they’ve put their new standard out yet but i know they have been working quite hard on a sort of update to their standard to

Make it more rigorous and interestingly one of the things that they’re intending to add is is a way of sort of assessing the carbon impact of the forestry practices which is something that fsc currently does not do so um you know i think i personally i don’t think from what

I’ve what i understand of the whole issue which is incredibly complex is that you know neither of those standards assures that there’s any net balance of carbon staying in the forest ecosystem because of their practices you know at best that iso standard is kind of just assuming that well if you do good

Forestry you’re not upsetting the carbon balance but i think there’s lots of evidence to say well we very well might be and quite likely are and until we’re actually measuring that it doesn’t seem like the right thing to do to just assume that the carbon we’re taking out of forests is

Being replaced at a reasonable rate um so you know i think i think the way the iso standard sort of handles wood by using those two forestry you know certifications is not really adequate i think it’s it’s sort of um an unfortunate shorthand that we don’t know

Whether it’s doing the thing that that they’re assuming it is doing yeah and i i was looking into this just a last year and i think that that the factors that seem to affect carbon in a forest the greatest by different forestry practices are one is the is the rotation length how

Long you’re letting a tree stand before you cut it down and if you can let it stand longer you’re going to sequester more carbon in the forest than if you rotate it every 20 years or 30 years so longer rotation times really matter um the amount of one of the differences in

Years past between fsc and sfi was the amount of buffer zone they had around streams and things like that and having a larger buffer zone seemed to make a big difference smaller clear-cut areas sfi used to allow larger clear cuts in acreage than sf than fsc did

All those things when you do a clear cut you really start to impact the soil carbon carbon comes out of the soil when the tree canopy goes away and it so it comes right out of the soil when it’s exposed so all of those things i think are ways you can

Get at how to increase the carbon storage of a forest but nobody as chris is saying is actually really measuring it yet and they’re trying to there’s people working on it i think probably it’ll be out in a few years people will be taking forest carbon into account which is really the

Bottom line not the not the other carbon the whole forest yeah no and i think to be fair that um essentially the differences in practice between sfi and fsc in many cases the fsc period uh practices that have been more rigorous have been implicitly if not explicitly around

Some of these issues around more effective treatment of the resource as a whole including carbon performance right and they’re getting closer and closer together all the time right right yeah yeah fsc has been a forcing function for sfi for sure so um okay other hands other questions or comments for our esteemed speakers

Okay well there’s nothing wrong with ending a few minutes early oh there’s one yeah oh we got one i have oh yes well go ahead okay ned go ahead yeah i just wanted to just share appreciation for the ecological uh insights i’ve heard throughout the presentation it’s it’s really

From the architecture community i really appreciate that so thank you very much great ian you had a question or comment um yeah i just have i have a few closing remarks that we can give and then we can wrap things up a few minutes early if that works um

Larry i have one or two slides for closing on your i’m gonna go back to that right now hang on a second okay um i realized the share screen and then i’m gonna make it full screen in a second uh perfect um yeah i can verbally do it also um

But yeah larry chris thank you for joining um for q a especially that was awesome to get some context behind some of your your slides and points um and you as well thanks for chiming in um and everybody who joined today really to contribute to the conversation that was

Pretty awesome to see that the wealth of knowledge in our communal group um we’re we’ll be making slides um and the recording viewable for you all that registered i’ll be sending those out probably friday monday at the latest um for you all to you know review and take

In anything you may have missed i recognize that the audio for the video could have been a bit better so we’ll try to to accommodate that when i send things out also today we had aia health safety and welfare units available two of them so in registration any architects

Could have and should have included their aia number if you did not when registering feel free to reach out and we can get that all shored up um we have a lot of upcoming courses especially through march is pretty packed um we’re continuing continuing with our energy code connect

Code cycle preview for the 2022 energy code so we have a single family project multi-family projects and non-residential projects courses coming up throughout the month of march we also have an all-electric building stories from the field presented by imbalance screen consulting on march 10th and then at the end of the month

We have a bpi certificate for contractors on healthy housing principles as well as our regional forum focused on household education what is the big deal about heat pumps and electrification on march 30th you can visit our website which i’ll link to in the chat here for more event specifics and registration otherwise

On the next slide is just some contact information on our website as well you’re welcome to reach out anytime at info 3cren.org we’d love to hear from you all and and kind of gauge you all on what you’re looking for for us to host and really any other industry insight you may offer

With that i will thank you all again and we can close things up all right thanks everyone thank you enjoy the rest of your day yeah thanks