In the Embodied Carbon Game for Over 10 Years
by Amy Hattan
Vice President for Corporate Responsibility, Thornton Tomasetti
Nine years ago, I began working at the engineering services firm Thornton Tomasetti as its first Corporate Responsibility Officer. My earliest task was to manage the annual reporting required for members of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2030 Commitment – and to engage in this reporting with a unique twist.
The Commitment, whose members are mostly architects, asks that member firms submit the predicted energy use intensity for their projects.
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At that time, my firm was primarily engaged in structural engineering, and measuring the operational energy of our projects did not seem to be the best assessment of our direct contribution. Because of the large impact of structural materials on a building’s carbon footprint, we proposed to the AIA that we would report on the embodied carbon in our structural engineering projects. Thus, we began our multi-year R&D project on embodied carbon.
Over the course of our years as a member of the Commitment, we developed a sizeable embodied carbon database of over 600 projects. This comprehensive database gave us the opportunity to engage in several collaborations with the goal of identifying benchmarks for embodied carbon in structures. We collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and with the Carbon Leadership Forum.
These collaborations fed into the CLF Embodied Carbon Benchmark Study and to the initiation of the Structural Engineers 2050 Challenge. After sending our embodied carbon report to the AIA year after year for a program that was focused on operational energy use, I was very excited to help start a new commitment that was tailor-made for structural engineers. We need the data from other firms like us to make our own data more relevant to the entire field.
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