My team worked with Placework and it opened my eyes to the impact the building sector has on the environment.

Though it is a shocking statistic, I saw it as an opportunity to bring to light ways the industry can start to change.

This post was written by Durga Raja, a rising senior at the University of New Hampshire majoring in Environmental and Resource Economics with a dual major in Sustainability.

Throughout my undergraduate education, my most meaningful experiences have been through research and internships. I had the opportunity to intern with the UNH Sustainability Institute as a peer mentor for the Climate Action Clinic – a professional development course where students get hands-on experience working with local businesses and organizations to calculate their carbon footprint. In Fall 2023, my team worked with Placework and it opened my eyes to the impact the building sector has on the environment. During the clinic, the idea of calculating embodied carbon was mentioned, but we didn’t get the time to dive into that part of Placework’s emissions. Fast forward a few months later, I was interviewing for a position as a Sustainability Fellow for Placework, and luckily Alyssa and Brian thought I was the perfect fit.

Placework Door with Durga

In the first few weeks of my fellowship, I got to know everyone at Placework by asking them more about their role and where their work intersects with my work on embodied carbon accounting. It was so nice to hear about all the work Placework was already doing in managing and calculating the emissions of their building designs, and how excited they were to hear more about my project. I quickly learned more about the architecture industry by attending weekly team meetings, and their weekly Design Thinking workshops. I was also able to join a site visit to the UNH Field House to see a current Placework project in construction. All these things allowed me to expand my knowledge on how architecture firms operate and provided a great foundation for learning more about how they can reduce emissions of their building designs.

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This summer, a large portion of my work was researching how the architecture industry has been calculating embodied carbon emissions and ways to reduce those emissions. Some of the most useful resources have been from the Carbon Leadership Forum and
Path to Zero Carbon Series published by LMN Architects of Seattle. One of the biggest points I took away from this part of my fellowship was a statement from LMN, “The built environment that we care for emits roughly 50% of climate change causing emissions worldwide.” This quote inspired me and motivated the work that I did because though it is a shocking statistic, I saw it as an opportunity to bring to light ways the industry can start to change – and that starts with first measuring the emissions to identify reduction potential.

For this project, we used TallyLCA to quantify the embodied carbon emissions. TallyLCA is a software that uses a combination of a database and product-specific EPD’s (Environmental Product Declarations) for emission factors. It draws data directly from the Revit models for the building. We ran three Placework building designs through TallyLCA – the Madbury Public Library, Saint Anselm College’s Humanities Institute, and Roberts Farm Classroom. I also used a tool called EC3 to calculate estimated operational carbon emissions for Saint Anselm College’s Humanities Institute using the pEUI (predicted energy use intensity) from Placework’s DDx data, and by inputting the building’s fuel source and e-grid region. Those operational carbon emissions were used to show the impact embodied carbon has on total carbon emissions of a building (total carbon emissions consist of both embodied and operational emissions).

Embodied Carbon by Building Material, Normalized by Sq. Meter

STA Humanities Institute: Total Carbon Emissions for 60-Year Operation

On a normalized basis, the Humanities Institute has the lowest embodied carbon emissions among the three buildings.

This is mainly because this building was an adaptive reuse of an existing building, which demonstrates the positive impact using existing buildings has on reducing embodied carbon emissions.

The embodied carbon emissions made up only 11% of Saint Anselm’s total carbon emissions; the percentage of embodied carbon is expected to be higher with buildings that are new builds.

Working with Placework has also been a great experience, everyone is passionate about what they do and passionate about doing better. It was amazing being part of this work!

Resources:

  • Watch Durga’s “Designing the Carbon out of Architecture” presentation