In this all-hands-on-deck moment for the climate, construction industry professionals have an incredible opportunity to significantly reduce their work’s immediate carbon impact at little to no cost, with tools and strategies available to them today, and without disrupting much of their process. What achieving these levels of reduction does require is critically assessing both the embodied carbon (EC) and operational carbon (OC) of a project. An optimized minimum of a project’s total carbon emissions can only be met by evaluating concurrently EC’s and OC’s relative contributions and the strategies to reduce them, rather than solving for one at the expense of the other.
In the first part of our two-part article, we covered the background context of the science of EC in construction and the tools used in its calculations. In this part, we discuss how Magnusson Architecture and Planning and Bright Power worked together to achieve this optimized minimum in a case study project.
Read the full article on Passive House Accelerator.