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New forum setting benchmarks for greener construction

Xinhua, April 29, 2017 Adjust font size:

The Carbon Leadership Forum, a collaborative effort among academics and industry professionals, has taken a step toward measuring and reducing the global carbon footprint of building construction and long-term maintenance.

The forum, based in the University of Washington (UW) College of Built Environments, has published the results of its Embodied Carbon Benchmark Study, which employs a process called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to measure embodied carbon emissions, namely all carbon emissions that occur when extracting, manufacturing and installing building materials.

There is growing recognition in the building industry of the need to track carbon emissions across a building's entire period of use, or full life cycle, said Kate Simonen, architect, structural engineer and UW associate professor of architecture, who leads the carbon forum, adding that industry professionals need better information and guidance on how to implement low-carbon method in practice.

The benchmark study, as the first stage of the ongoing project called LCA for Low Carbon Construction, includes the largest known interactive database of building-embodied carbon with information on more than 1,000 buildings, enables industry professionals to include these data into their decision making, and provides a foundation for the next stage of the project, the development of a Life Cycle Assessment Practice Guide, due by the end of 2017.

"Manufacturing materials and constructing buildings results in significant energy use and carbon impact," Simonen was quoted as saying in a news release from UW. "This research helps us answer questions such as: Is this a high (or low) carbon building? Which material choices or building systems lead to lower carbon solutions? How significant are 'green' design choices?"

"In the design phase, our data enables architects and engineers to use carbon, and other environmental impacts, as a performance criteria in addition to common criteria such as cost and strength, when specifying and selecting concrete," she said.

To place construction-related carbon emissions in real-world perspective, Simonen noted that construction alone of a single "low embodied carbon" office building could save 30 million kilograms, or 33,000 tons, in carbon emissions, "equivalent of avoiding driving a car around the Earth 3,000 times." Endit