46% of Buildings “Embodied Carbon” can be slashed at little to no cost
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Update time : 2022-04-20 19:31:34
Buildings and their construction account for around 40% of all carbon emissions today. Half those emissions come from the construction alone, so buildings successfully powered by clean energy won’t come close to fixing the whole problem. John Matson and Rebecca Esau at RMI describe how industry leaders are creating the tools to measure and gather data on the “embodied carbon” in building materials (concrete, rebar, glazing, insulation, other steel), and make them freely available so the problem is transparently quantifiable – an essential first step. The authors quote research that says as much as 46% of this embodied carbon can be slashed at little to no cost (less than 0.5% of the total project cost). So once visibility of the carbon is established, customers have little excuse to do nothing about it. The goal is for embodied carbon to become a key metric of building performance. It can then become a deal-breaker over what gets bought and what gets built, as industry leaders and policymakers use their influence and purchasing power to reshape the marketplace. Once wide-scale adoption of low-carbon materials makes them price-competitive, they will become the norm. The sector has done it before: it’s the way low-VOC paints and lead-free materials have now become the standard.
