The processes of building material extraction, manufacturing, transportation and construction are ALL responsible for carbon emissions. So, how do you compare these embodied costs to make the best choices around which materials to use? How do you know whether it’s better for the environment to retrofit an existing building or build a new, passive one? How do you determine whether a building truly qualifies as zero-carbon? The primary tool we use to measure environmental impact is the life cycle assessment
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, it’s Ross from Reversing Climate Change. I wanted to let you know that we have a new podcast called Carbon Removal Newsroom. It’s short form, it’s timely, and it’s all about carbon removal. Whenever we see a good news story about carbon removal, or that should be about carbon removal, we’re going to record a short episode about it with a rotating cast of guests. So please subscribe to Carbon Removal Newsroom, check it out in your podcast app of choice, and thank you so much for your support.
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I am Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jaspé. Again, no producer. Paul, where are you? We need you. I’m doing this alone. I need your help. Please, please come back. It’s nice to have someone to watch the levels while you’re doing it so you’re not having to chat at the same time, but I’m growing into this role. I think I’m doing okay.
Christophe Jospe: I think you are, Ross. Ross is on the levels. Ross and I were feeling a little nostalgic today because we’re actually recording this podcast in the library at University of Washington. And of the many hats that Ross wears at Nori, one of them is librarian.
Ross Kenyon: That just means that when I moved up to Seattle, I brought my books and the ones that even tenuously fit what Nori is about, I just stuffed into our library cabinets.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, but you also loan them out and give me foul looks if I return them a little bit sullied.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. Alden has a book about carbon markets and I keep nagging her.
Christophe Jospe: Right. So you do a good job at that. That’s it for the bicker banter. Moving on now. I would like to introduce our guest. It’s really exciting today to have an expert in the field, someone who knows what she’s talking about, who can perhaps teach us a little bit around carbon accounting because that’s what we’re trying to build a business We get particularly excited when thinking about opportunities that have historically emitted carbon that can potentially play a role in storing that same carbon. And so this episode We’ll get into a lot of the ideas around the built environment, life cycle assessments, and various things that really can move the needle in addressing the total amount of carbon going into the atmosphere.
So without any further ado, sitting to my left is Professor Kate Simonen. She is the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, and she also has been a founder, starter of the Carbon Leadership Forum, and I’m sure we’ll learn more what that is all about. But Kate, welcome to the show. It’s really great to have you on here. We like to start the show with understanding the origins of how people got to where they are today, which is sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So how did it all get started?
Kate Simonen: Oh, well, that’s an interesting question. So I am trained as an architect and structural engineer, and I was practicing as such in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I got together with a team looking to try and build low-carbon buildings, so zero-carbon buildings. And in that process, we started by thinking that was zero operating emissions. So buildings that were super energy efficient with solar panels. And then we started to look at how we were going to make those buildings and started to get questions about the supply chain. So how could you make a sustainable building?
What materials were you using? Were you using concrete or steel or wood? And where does it come from? And that led me to try and understand what is the impact of manufacturing the materials that we use to build buildings and transporting them around the world. And that led me to life cycle assessment, which is the accounting method to understand those impacts. I joined the University of Washington about nine years ago as a faculty member and started my research to try and understand and communicate that data more clearly.
Ross Kenyon: And what I found is there was a lot of interesting work Yeah, we talked about this on a recent episode with Jimmy Gia, a clean tech entrepreneur up here in Seattle about drawing the system boundaries of lifecycle analyses. Am I jumping the gun? Am I okay to do this?
Unknown speaker: You’re not.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Is it analyses or assessment?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Just to call you out there.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, lifecycle assessments. Yeah, that’s an LCA. Talk about how to build a pencil. There’s a factory and there’s a tree that goes into it, but there’s also the machines that cut down those trees. And then what about the agriculture that went to feed the people who cut down the tree? And then the machines that made the food. It’s like every act of consumption is in some way participating in the entire global economy. But if you treat an LCA like this, are you even able to functionally talk about it? Does it become impossible?
How do you draw these system boundaries in a way that is actually useful?
Kate Simonen: That’s a great question because how the system boundary is defined will impact the results. So what do you include in your analysis and what do you exclude? And lifecycle assessment is an evolving method. So different analyses can have different system boundaries and then therefore different results. So the pencil article is great. And I would encourage people to read it if they’re looking for an interesting thought expander. You know, one of the things like growing the coffee to feed the workers versus making the manufacturing equipment. So there are standardized methods that exist.
So commonly, for example, the people are assumed to exist no matter what. So the assumption is, is that even if you weren’t cutting down trees, you would probably still have a cup of coffee. And so that the cup of coffee and the people themselves tend to be outside the system boundary.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like additionality, kind of. Is that the term that you end up using or is there some other term for it?
Christophe Jospe: That guy would have drunk a coffee and done some other job that had nothing to do with the pencil. It would have happened anyways. It would have happened anyways.
Ross Kenyon: You can’t attribute it to the building.
Kate Simonen: Right. But there are more challenging questions like, should you include the impact of making the cement kiln and divide it out over the many different years that the cement is made? So that one arguably should, because it’s the impact of making cement. You have to make a cement kiln. But sometimes when one is conducting an LCA, there are different reasons why you might conduct an LCA. So if the goal is to understand the So, yeah. The system boundary for wood products is challenging in terms of how far back into the forest do you include?
Did the forest exist? Are the forests the same as that cup of coffee? Or are the forests related to the forest products? And how do you include that?
Ross Kenyon: We’ve thought a little bit about using forest products as instances of carbon removal if you’re able to sustainably harvest wood and build wooden buildings out of it that could store carbon, assuming that forest is replacing carbon that you took out of the forest. But it does seem to get a little tricky in there. I don’t think we’ve been able to fully wrap our heads around probably system boundary issues. You think that’s fair to say?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think we can be a little bit hand-wavy at this moment in time because we don’t have a live methodology for such a thing. But it brings to mind something that I want to attribute to Klaus Lackner, who I worked for for a number of years, who talked about mobilizing carbon globally. To help and perhaps simplify some of the carbon accounting in LCAs. So he essentially says if you mobilize a ton of carbon, you need to put another ton of carbon away because CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and mobilizing carbon.
Carbon can come from cutting down forests. It can come from burning fossil fuels, soil erosion, a whole bunch of natural processes. But the point is, it’s that balancing act. And LCA has become a useful tool, it seems, to help the carbon accounting in these various stages to say, when you mobilize the carbon, can you reduce that at some form of the process? Once you’ve now mobilized the carbon and got that building... Are you able to track emissions that say, I have this rosy-eyed view of there’s a world that actually wants to pay to put carbon away?
I don’t think we’re there yet. We’re trying to get there. But anyway, so that helps you kind of track these things that want to reduce the carbon. And then you obviously have all of these different system boundaries. So I guess I’m kind of just garbling some words to potentially compose a question around carbon. So I’m going to start just with a building. Sure.
Kate Simonen: As opposed to buildings.
Christophe Jospe: Or even a room if you want.
Kate Simonen: Extracting those materials and then manufacturing them. So there’s electricity that’s used and there’s often chemical reactions that take place in the formation of new materials. And then there’s transportation and construction. So that phase is often called the embodied impact. So the impacts embodied in the materials of a building. And then there’s the stages of using a building. That includes operating the So using electricity and water and heat, but they’re also during the use phase. There’s also the impacts of repairing materials and maintaining those materials. And then there would be the end of life stage.
So did you demolish the building? What do you do with the materials at end of life? What happens to them? Do they rot or do you reuse them? And then there is things that happen outside the system boundary that Like, are you able to avoid manufacturing more steel because you recycle a lot of steel? Or how much carbon was sequestered in the growth of wood materials? So there are formalized life cycle stages that are used to characterize where those impacts are. Interestingly, if you change from a building to buildings, which gets to cities and infrastructure, there is a constant flow of things that are built and demolished and There’s the electrical grid.
And so I’m pointing out that it starts to get more complicated. However, it’s not necessarily essential to define the full complex system to take action to improve the system. So our work at the Carbon Leadership Forum is emphasizing increasing awareness of architects, owners, and builders that the choices they make in materials matter. And identifying strategies both from a computational perspective, calculating the carbon, but also making good choices. So simply speaking, you’re better off reusing a building than tearing it down and building a new one. That sounds sort of obvious.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, what if it’s a really clean building? Or like a really progressive, excellent, good steward of its resources building?
Kate Simonen: You mean tear down a bad building and build a super clean building?
Ross Kenyon: You’re saying in some cases it would be much better to just keep the old buildings?
Kate Simonen: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. Okay.
Kate Simonen: If we think about a lot of the impacts are in foundation systems and the primary structure of the system. So if you can keep the existing structure and upgrade the insulation or the mechanical systems, you can improve the operations.
Ross Kenyon: That’s what retrofitting is?
Kate Simonen: Yes. So retrofitting good. And when you’re building, use the materials really efficiently. So don’t be completely driven by form. So there’s some choices that you can make about how you build your building that uses less material. And then pick lower carbon or carbon sequestering materials.
Christophe Jospe: I find that, I mean, I first of all love the concept of let’s do things that don’t emit more carbon. And if that’s reusing a building or repurposing it, great, fully on board. As a New Yorker, we used to live in a city where there are some rather tall skyscrapers going up. And I think architects, and maybe this will resonate with you, some architects, I’m sure you can think of at least one, have quite large egos. They want to build the tallest building. And they’re doing it actually because that’s what people want.
And so there’s this kind of dirty secret is that when you build really tall buildings, that’s going to release a lot of carbon and the energy that the building consumes and the various things that go into that input. So there’s this pressure, I think, where you say formatting. I mean, in the next decade in New York City, we’re going to see a number of really I’m curious to understand some of your insight into the forces that are both retrofitting old buildings and what you’re up against in some of the new gaudy buildings that aren’t all that good.
Kate Simonen: Surely it’s not the best use of our resources for individual people to have multiple large homes that sit unused. So if you’re going to talk about what would be our best action, it would not be build extra homes for super wealthy people while the rest of other people are not in homes. There are studies that compare relative height and the carbon impacts of making them and then the carbon impacts of operating them. And People come to position statements of the ideal density of neighborhoods related to reducing transportation because it’s also not so great to spread everybody out really large distances.
So there’s a trade-off there. I think probably the more pressing question is the developing world and the amount of construction that’s going to be happening in China, India, and Asia broadly over the next 30 years. And that construction is important from an equity perspective. Yet the consumption of material resources is significant. I’m trying to remember my direct quote. So it’s something like we’re going to be building the equivalent of a Manhattan every 35 days.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to say if you didn’t, because Andrew Himes dropped that same nugget on his episode of the podcast.
Kate Simonen: So we might not have the exact date. It might be 32 and it might be 37, but.
Ross Kenyon: You’ll have to take it up with Andrew.
Kate Simonen: You guys can duke that one out.
Christophe Jospe: For the next 30 years. 30 years.
Kate Simonen: And those buildings need to be material efficient. But they are also a great opportunity to be carbon sinks. If we can figure out how to grow aggregate cost effectively from smokestacks, then we could be sticking carbon into the concrete foundations.
Ross Kenyon: Like the aggregate that goes into the making of concrete.
Kate Simonen: Oh, yeah. Aggregate is just rock. Sorry. That’s a technical term for rock or sand.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to play extra dumb here today. Yeah.
Kate Simonen: No, no, that’s a good one. So we’re actually short of good rocks and sand. So it might seem crazy, but Hawaii is now importing sand.
Ross Kenyon: And the punchline is?
Kate Simonen: Oh, and the punchline is if we can stick carbon in sand.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it just sounded like a great setup for a joke.
Kate Simonen: Oh, no, I’m not actually funny. I’m not funny. I don’t actually have jokes.
Ross Kenyon: That’s it. You could have told us that beforehand.
Kate Simonen: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I’m embarrassed now.
Ross Kenyon: No. Okay. So Hawaii is importing sand because they can’t make concrete with the amount of sand that they have there.
Kate Simonen: Right. They need sand and gravel of a certain quality that you don’t want to dredge all the beaches of Hawaii to use.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Where do you get it? Where is the sand coming from?
Kate Simonen: Well, I know where it’s coming from here. There are aggregate mines in Washington state, and there are also aggregate that comes from British Columbia. And that’s like super high quality Canadian rock. Super strong.
Ross Kenyon: How does it start storing carbon? Do they treat it in some new way?
Kate Simonen: Oh, standard rock is not actively storing carbon. But there are emerging technologies that, okay, now I’m outside my expertise. They do something. So they can capture the carbon that comes out of the smokestack, so concentrated carbon, and grow little bits of sand or direct air capture mechanisms as a potential. So imagine what I’ve seen look like a giant air conditioner of some sort that was spitting stuff out. You probably know more about this than I do.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s Kristoff’s background. He does a lot about that. That’s coming at some point here. And so you’re saying that buildings will be able to concrete. I’m not sure how much responsibility that industry has for climate change, but I think it’s a double digit percentage of manmade greenhouse gases. Yes.
Kate Simonen: Yes, depends on which system boundary you draw, but really close, 10% from cement and concrete production. And cement and concrete are really useful materials. So it’s an interesting trade-off, high impact and high utility.
Ross Kenyon: Sure, we wouldn’t want to give up concrete. But over time, you’re saying that buildings will be able to, I don’t know if they’ll be able to offset the entire amount of the emissions from their concrete or just make it go down a lot, or could it even become truly carbon negative? Yeah.
Kate Simonen: That’s our goal. So as a group, we used to be modest in our ambitions and say we just want to reduce embodied carbon. But now we want the built environment to be a carbon sink. And it seems plausible, just like going to the moon seemed plausible, like hard and needs a lot of work, but plausible.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, you’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. So we’re liable to run our mouths about big goals as much as anyone. So I hope that works.
Christophe Jospe: We’re very excited about aggregates and concrete generally. Yeah, we’re kind of counting on you. So keep it up. I want to go back to you mentioned the Carbon Leadership Forum and talking about actual practical uses for LCAs. So can you just give some example? I mean, I love the goal, the ambition long term. We’re totally aligned and on the same team. We want buildings to be net carbon sinks, but they’re not there yet. But LCAs still have usefulness. And so can you, for our listeners, kind of explain why someone might want to use an LCA today and how they’re being used?
Kate Simonen: Okay. In the building industry, there’s really two scales of LCAs that are taking place. One is at a product. So a product-specific LCA is conducted and can report the results in an environmental product declaration, an EPD. EPDs are sort of like nutrition labels in that you can read an EPD and have a sense of the carbon emissions for a specific product. The U. S. Green Building Council and other green building programs gives credits. So you can get credits if you use products with EPDs. And that’s really about disclosure. So this is new as a practice that a manufacturer would disclose the carbon and other environmental impacts of their manufacturing.
So it’s not across the industry. And then there’s the look towards improvement. And so then one could conduct what’s called a whole building LCA. But frankly, it’s really a part of a whole building LCA usually. So typically people are analyzing the big hitters of the structural system, the beams and the columns and the exterior walls, the windows and insulation and things like that.
Ross Kenyon: It’s the steel. Is that the big harmful one?
Kate Simonen: Oh, now you’re trying another political comment.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m trying to put you somewhere we’re going to dig yourself out.
Kate Simonen: What’s bad about building buildings is we use a lot of material. And materials tend to have a high impact, especially the materials that require a fair amount of energy to process.
Ross Kenyon: That’s concrete, that’s steel.
Kate Simonen: That’s glass, that’s insulation, that’s aluminum, plastics.
Ross Kenyon: I’m still not entirely clear what insulation is, but I’ve been made quite itchy in my grandma’s attic once.
Christophe Jospe: You were that kid.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was like, it’s cotton candy.
Christophe Jospe: This is so cool.
Kate Simonen: Yeah, no, that’s not smart.
Ross Kenyon: No, it was.
Christophe Jospe: Well, I’m very glad that you did not die from that experience so that we could record this podcast. I also am glad because I want to play this game that we are going to try out for the very first time. It’s called Good LCA, Bad LCA. So I’ll say Good LCA, and then Kate will finish my sentence.
Kate Simonen: Yeah, and what I really appreciate is that you didn’t tell me this ahead of time. Okay.
Christophe Jospe: So it’s totally improvised, no prep. Okay, here we go. A good LCA is?
Kate Simonen: One that defines the system boundary.
Christophe Jospe: A bad LCA is?
Kate Simonen: One that doesn’t tell you anything about their analysis method, just the result.
Christophe Jospe: A good LCA is?
Kate Simonen: One that uses consistent data.
Christophe Jospe: A bad LCA is?
Kate Simonen: One that declares it’s better than everybody else without being third-party reviewed.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Keep the politics out of this, Kate. Tone it down.
Kate Simonen: Tone it down. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: You’ve been warned more than once.
Kate Simonen: Okay. A bad LCA is one that... Declare why you want to do it. The goal. So I want to do an LCA because I want to know what’s the better solution. But then you analyze something totally different. Like... I just reviewed one that I thought was bad. So somebody was comparing the transportation distances for using different cement alternates in concrete. And they highlighted the differences in ecotoxicity of transportation and ignored the differences in carbon impact of the concrete mix. So they picked what in the end is low significant impact differences and not prioritizing high significant impacts.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Kate Simonen: Impacts of transporting fly ash is not the biggest problem on the planet.
Ross Kenyon: What is ecotoxicity and what exactly is that?
Kate Simonen: It’s a measure of the toxic emissions within the environment. I don’t like that question. Basically, it’s an environmental impact category that’s not commonly used because there is not as broad of a global consensus on the relevance of the reporting to the actual change in environmental health.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I understand. So people pretty much agree with LCAs that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, we need to be watching for those. But then there are other types of chemicals that there’s more disagreement about.
Kate Simonen: Or their importance of. So ozone depletion, super important. However, there’s been policy to reduce the ozone depleting chemical emissions. And so therefore making choices based on how much ozone depleting emissions are taking place are not very relevant because they’re all super small right now.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, understood. This is a hard game, Kristoff.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, should we end it? Or do you have one more round in you? Let’s try it. This is our final round of the game. A good LCA.
Kate Simonen: Follows ISO standards and reports goal and scope and information. I think I’m repeating myself. But because LCAs can be different based on what you include... And how you analyze it, it can’t be a good LCA unless you tell people how you did it.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think if there’s one take-home point, you, the scientist, or really anyone who’s making any kind of declaration and any kind of estimation, need to put your assumptions up front so that someone else can come along and replicate that same thing. That’s like the basic tenet of science.
Kate Simonen: It is. Yes. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds good. I wanted to get into the various scopes and various other things that were referenced. Or do you really want me to do a bad LCC?
Kate Simonen: Especially since I keep repeating myself.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it sounds like if you are repeating yourself, also, if you’re listening to this podcast, it’s not as easy as it sounds to be witty and on it. Christophe and I constantly are putting our foot in the mouth and we listen back to them later and say, oops. So, yeah, could you impact the last comment a bit about the scope?
Kate Simonen: Well, for example, one could compare two different buildings. Yeah. And if you just said this building is the lowest impact building and you didn’t say what was included, sometimes studies, for example, ignore the entire foundation system because they don’t have data on it. So if you don’t have the foundation system, there’s limits to what kind of conclusions you could draw.
Ross Kenyon: So it looks cleaner than it might otherwise be.
Kate Simonen: Because you just don’t include everything.
Christophe Jospe: So this seems like a real challenge that’s facing the construction industry and part of your work has been to develop tools to help them face these challenges around standardization and creating estimations that take a whole look at the building, which is with the EC3, which is the Embodied Carbon... Construction. Construction calculator. The EC3 calculator. Do you call it calculator? Is that kind of like ISO standards where ISO is International Standards Organization, but you just say standards again because it’s one of those things?
Kate Simonen: No, we call it the EC3 tool. Got it.
Christophe Jospe: Got it. Okay. And we love the EC3 tool that obviously has been a broad stakeholder development where you have people and entities which are working in the construction industry. You have architects who can come together. I love that it seems to state its assumptions up front so you actually know how those calculations are made. But can you talk a little bit about how the EC3 tool addresses some of these challenges in not full lifecycle accounting?
Kate Simonen: Yeah, so first off, the EC3 tool uses LCA data. So it uses those environmental product declarations that report materials and is designed to help design, construction, and owner teams differentiate between materials up the supply chain. It is not a tool at the present state that could conduct a whole building lifecycle assessment. So it’s being really explicit that it’s around product procurement. So I know I want to buy steel or I want to buy reinforcing steel. What are my choices and how could I make those choices? So we’re in the phase one of that project.
So we’ve got some structural engineers piloting it and we’re just about to start with some general contractors piloting it. The main objective of this project is to try to make the complexity that we’re talking about. Simpler for design and construction teams to act upon. So we’re working with C-Change Labs, who’s doing the technological development, all of the work of both user interface and data management. That’s super exciting because that’s not my area of expertise. And our job at the University of Washington is both to facilitate the dialogue across different industry groups and then help establish what that transparent data analysis is.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I imagine if you were in the construction industry and even if it was a big priority of yours to build buildings in the most ecological fashion possible, the amount of information that’s necessary once the scope is broad enough is really quite challenging. I think even if you had the right intentions, your job might be stymied just by a lack of centralized information and the world economy generally.
Kate Simonen: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, the first step of what we’re doing is quite simple in that we’re collecting what data exists, enabling it to be sorted and evaluating the data to assess whether or not it’s comparable as an intermediate step. So, I mean, that really is right now. If I’m an architect, an engineer, an owner, I wouldn’t even know what are the possible ranges. So, you know, what is the low carbon concrete that one can get in Seattle? Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: For architects, I want to go back to Christophe’s comment about the desire to build bigger and bigger buildings. And I don’t know too many architects. If your ego is bruised by us saying your ego is big, very sorry. You can write to us. We’ll issue a formal apology to the International Society of Architects or whatever professional standards body. The AIA. Yeah. Is there a tendency or a race? I would imagine if I was an architect, These days, I would be trying to build the cleanest, most environmental building possible. I’m sure just the size of the building is no longer the main metric that people are rushing for.
They also want it to be a leader in being environmentally sound. Is that a trend that’s happening?
Kate Simonen: So I have two different responses that I want to give to you. So first I’ll talk about the trend within the architecture and engineering professions. So there is a noticeable trend of understanding the interconnected complexities of the environmental impact of building from operating and building them. The Pacific Northwest is sort of known as a hub of embodied carbon, but I would extend that all the way to the West. So the West Coast, there is a lot of understanding and interest around that. I’m going to go back a little bit to the ego because it is not just the ego of the architect.
And in fact, the architect in many cases, in almost all cases, is hired by somebody else. And so the choice of an egotistical architect is usually linked to the choice of an egotistical client. The clients are the ones that make the primary direction and decision making.
Ross Kenyon: You’re like a giant real estate magnet naming no names. I don’t know anyone off the top of my head.
Kate Simonen: No, no, no. But, you know, and companies have desires to make buildings that are notable and stunning that might not be just about ego per se. So. One of the interesting issues is to figure out what are the no-cost options, the best practices that one can implement within any type of building, from low-income housing to a high-rise tower. So that, you know, there are some fundamental principles about getting to zero operating energy. All of our buildings should be there by 2030, all of our new buildings. And we need to figure out pathways so all of our buildings can get to zero carbon by 2050.
Ross Kenyon: If I wanted to show off to my neighbors and I had enough money to buy a house and got enough money to build a house, I think if I wanted to show off, the best way to do it would be make one of these houses that is living. It has a green roof on it. It’s maximized to take advantage of the sun. Passive house. Passive house. Yes. Is that the best way to show off if you’re rich and you want to show that you care?
Kate Simonen: So if I’m talking to the rich people showing they want to care that are in your audience, is that sort of what I’m hearing you say?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Give us my advice. Me in the future when I want to do this.
Kate Simonen: Well, you know, yes, you should be making plans to do that. So you probably in the future will be doing that. So you or any person who owns large amounts of real estate, it might be difficult to radically change what you’re doing today, but you should be having a strategy and plan of how that’s going to be implemented over time.
Ross Kenyon: But keep in mind, listeners, that you need to make sure that you could you just stay in the house that you’re in now? It might be worse to build that passive house. Am I learning?
Kate Simonen: It might actually be. It might actually be better. So if you’re going to tear down the house at one location, you’re probably better off retrofitting it and adding solar panels.
Ross Kenyon: At some point, though, is there enough?
Kate Simonen: And maybe appreciating your 1995 kitchen or putting carbon storing counters in, which don’t exist quite yet.
Ross Kenyon: No, like marble and granite. No one has figured out some other material for that yet. I’d give something more important to say than countertops probably.
Christophe Jospe: No, I like the guests who sort of prime the questions they want to be asked. And I think you’re going there a little bit, Kate, when you say carbon sequestering materials in buildings or the built environment. So- Talk to us a little bit about that. What are some of the challenges and opportunities for storing carbon in the built environment? And maybe just we can start with the countertop, but I’m sure there’s more.
Kate Simonen: Yes. Okay. So the opportunity is huge. There’s a large mass of materials that are used in buildings. So if you think of carbon just as a chemical that has mass that we need to stick in things, if we can figure out how to make useful materials from that carbon, there’s a lot of opportunity. You know, not just the structural system, but the table that we’ve got here, furniture, the furnishings all along. So there are manufacturers that are setting targets to having carbon neutral products. Interface Carpet is one that they’ve got plans of figuring out how they can sequester materials, reuse materials, reduce the carbon intensity of their energy sources.
So there are conventional materials like carpet. And then there are new materials that might be a new use of carbon fiber, right? That once we figured out how to do that in a cost effective way, we might be having carbon fiber tables.
Ross Kenyon: With buildings that are bigger than single family homes, I’ve seen there’s some pretty big buildings in Seattle that use wood as their structure. Yes, they’re beautiful. The beams are exposed and they’re really lovely, more so than if it was just an exposed steel beam if you’re in some cool warehouse-y kind of space, like many of the co-working spaces that I’ve been in have those kind of things. Why is that coming back? Why is wood as a structural support now either allowed? Was it disallowed? Did steel just steal the show for a while and now wood is back?
What’s happening?
Kate Simonen: That could be a whole podcast in itself.
Christophe Jospe: Is it a juicy topic?
Kate Simonen: Yes, a juicy topic.
Christophe Jospe: We should. Just a cross-laminated timber podcast, right?
Kate Simonen: So some of it has to do with new manufacturing techniques, making large pieces of wood out of smaller pieces. Yeah. Some of that is a renewed interest in the material, so people who feel that it’s beautiful and want to build with it. There have been recent changes to the building code which allow people to build taller buildings out of wood. There was a lot of debate about that. Wood can catch fire easier than steel and concrete, although steel and concrete also have issues with fire, so you have to fireproof steel and concrete also.
So in some ways, it’s a trend that construction crews have expertise in different methods. So if you look at some of the old buildings in Seattle, they’re all built out of heavy timber, big, large pieces of wood, partly because that was what was available. We had big trees and lots of people who knew how to build out of wood. And at that point in time, you had to ship the steel and the concrete in from Chicago. So, at that time, we had a workforce and material resources that was all wood.
There’s a lot of potential for sustainably managed forests to use wood as a carbon storing material, but you also have to use wood efficiently in order for it to be the best use of the material. So, carbon is stored in wood, but carbon is also emitted in manufacturing wood. And so using more wood in one building is not the best solution, even though more carbon would be stored in that building because you’re better off using that more wood and building more buildings. I’m sorry.
Ross Kenyon: So you have a meal ticket forever because it sounds like this LCA game is quite difficult. There’s a lot of nuance involved.
Christophe Jospe: Sounds like this EC3 tool has future uses to help identify that exact quandary.
Kate Simonen: Yes, and then really, and then interestingly going up then all into the supply chain of forests, and then you start to get to some of, I think, what would probably be the issues that you would be talking about is how does forest management play out in a benefit as a carbon benefit or not? And how do forest products be able to recognize that forest management benefit? One of the really interesting challenges is that products like a two by four tend to be graded just on its strength. Not on the carbon benefit of the whole supply chain.
Christophe Jospe: Speaking of forest management, I know this podcast will air sometime in the winter, which is not fire season. It’s weird to say that we now have fire season, but that’s a thing. But one of my favorite ideas I heard about forest management was actually the harvesting of wood that is at risk of burning or maybe already dead and basically converting that into biochar and turning that biochar into a solid material that could be carbon that somehow ends up in the built environment. Any reactions to that idea?
Kate Simonen: I haven’t heard that one but that’s interesting. Somebody also just recently pointed out that The forest fires end up making that biochar and then the wood hangs out in the forest for a while. The state of Washington owns a lot of and manages a lot of the forests. And if the state can figure out ways to help manage the forests well and get building wood products out of it, that would be a good win-win, right? Can we reduce fires, help our air quality, manage forests and buildings for carbon? That would be great.
So good potential.
Ross Kenyon: I hadn’t heard that one. That sounds pretty interesting, though. We should start wrapping it up. Is there anything else we should cover?
Christophe Jospe: We certainly have covered a lot of ground. I guess to put a question your way, Kate, if someone wants to get more involved in the LCA space or start thinking about carbon and buildings, where should they begin?
Kate Simonen: Probably the best place would be to join the Embodied Carbon Network. So the Embodied Carbon Network is supported by the Carbon Leadership Forum, but it’s an open access communication community. Now we’ve got about 300 people from around the world. These would be the embodied carbon nerds. I’ll call us all nerds. Embodied Carbon Aficionados. And it’s a place where people are sharing news and asking questions. So we also create our own series of webinars around embodied carbon in the built environment. It’s a place where people, if you ask a question within 24 hours, you get a bunch of people answering, giving you different answers to the question.
That would be the first place I would go. And then the Carbon Leadership Forum does have some resources online. And there’s some other organizations. Architecture 2030 has a Carbon Smart Material Palette.
Christophe Jospe: Cool. Yeah. I think you may have just forced our hand and Nori is going to join that network. That sounds like an amazing community. And so hopefully maybe some of our listeners will want to join and we’ll see you in there as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. Thanks for being with us, Kate. And then we recently sent out via the Nori newsletter, a podcast survey, and we heard that people very much wanted an outro. Sometimes we end abruptly. So I’m just going to keep talking and then gradually fade.
