Buildings in industrialized countries represent 38% of greenhousegas emissions. Improving their energy efficiency is a way to reduce these emissions, but doesn’t cover everything. ‘embodiedcarbon carbon’ or greenhouse gas emissions due to material use also represents a significant part of the carbon impact. Our experiences in guiding projects towards low embodied carbon resulted in ‘the SuReal guide towards net zero carbon buildings, a focus on Embodied Carbon’.
The experience based guide focusses first of all on life cycle assessments and how to use them strategically in each phase of a project. Besides that, the booklet demonstrates how a shift in our way of looking at materials has the biggest potential for carbon reduction. A building is only a temporary collection of different materials. The cities of today are a huge urban mine for the projects of tomorrow. Finally, embodied carbon is only one of the challenges when it comes to material choice and is therefore always approached in combination with topics such as health and wellbeing, esthetical and architectural quality, thermal comfort, energy efficiency, economic feasibility etc.
Source : SuReal
