Origin Story: The Embodied Carbon Benchmark Study

by Stefanie Barrera

The College of Built Environments at the University of Washington offers all 3+year M. Arch students a paid internship at different local firms after completing the first year of the program. As a student in this program, I was matched in the summer of 2016 with the Carbon Leadership Forum at the UW Integrated Design Lab.

At the Carbon Leadership Forum in 2016, I worked alongside Professor Kate Simonen and Ph.D. student Barbara Rodriguez Droguett on the Embodied Carbon Benchmark Project, which sought to develop a database of existing building embodied carbon studies to discover trends and establish better ways to reduce uncertainties in data collection.

The project was part of the Carbon Leadership Forum’s overarching goal to supporting tracking and reduction of ‘embodied’ carbon. In the past, the building industry has focused on reducing carbon emissions by increasing energy efficiency of operating buildings. Although this means buildings produce less operational carbon, tracking and reducing embodied carbon emissions has not been a priority.

New York Times
Concrete, a Centuries-Old Material, Gets a New Recipe

by Jane Margolies

On any given day, Central Concrete, in San Jose, Calif., does what concrete companies have been doing for centuries: combining sand, gravel, water and cement to create the slurry that is used in construction.

But Central — one of a handful of companies at the forefront of a movement to make a greener concrete — is increasingly experimenting with some decidedly new mixtures.

In one part of the plant, carbon dioxide from a chemical gas company is injected into the concrete, locking in that greenhouse gas and keeping it out of the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming. Elsewhere, engineers tinker with the recipe for concrete, trying out substitutes for some of the cement, which makes up about 15 percent of the mix and functions as the glue that holds it all together.