As the hyper-focus on sustainable building increases and as reducing carbon emissions becomes ever more important to building owners and developers, the low-hanging fruit of designing for energy efficiency is becoming the norm. Now there’s even more interest in another environmental concern that’s intensive in the built environment: reducing embodied carbon.
Since the building industry creates about 40 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions, and embodied carbon includes the greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing through end-of-life, alterations in the manufacturing process of the major embodied carbon contributors like concrete and steel can have a huge impact. In fact, a 2021 RMI report showed 19 to 46 percent emission reduction when using low- and no-cost solutions for reducing embodied carbon. And the required cost increase is less than 1 percent.
So how do you decrease embodied carbon?
Trying to wrestle down the emissions impact from embodied carbon included in Scope 3, which mainly consists of raw materials manufacturing and other value chain emissions, is a bigger challenge than decreasing Scope 1 emissions from powering your facility and Scope 2 emissions from energy consumption pulled from the grid. While it’s easier to control how much power you use and there are choices when it comes to how you source energy, embodied carbon depends largely on choices that others are making.
“The challenge is asking the companies to go on the journey with us,” says says Brent Trenga, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, and Director of Sustainability for Kingspan Insulated Panels North America, a company that has set a goal of 50 percent reduction in CO2 intensity in its primary supply chain partners by 2030. “In our business for insulated panels, the majority of the carbon intensity comes from the steel. Steel is carbon intensive to make and we're lucky in North America, specifically in the U.S., where we have a pretty clean mix of steel manufacturing, especially for what we do.”
In addition to options of on-site renewables and other sustainable efforts by suppliers, there’s the emerging use of electric arc furnace (EAF) technology in 30 percent of global steel plants, which is dramatically increasing the efficiency of production, reducing waste by reusing up to 90 percent recycled steel, and decreasing the overall embodied carbon of the steel. When the EAF is powered by on-site renewable electricity, embodied carbon can be even lower.
Transportation isn’t a big part of embodied carbon.
Even though transportation of everything as a whole is responsible for about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, manufacturing of building products like steel and concrete still has a much heavier embodied carbon footprint than transporting it. The manufacturing of concrete and steel alone is about 15 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.
“There's a really big misnomer that transportation has a huge impact on embodied carbon of our products” says Trenga. “Transport is a really small part of that carbon intensity. Specifically, typically three fourths of the intensity comes from the supply chain. It comes from the raw materials.”
Still, the way products are shipped can be a factor, as shipping across the water creates a whole lot less embodied carbon than shipping across ground.
How can small companies reduce embodied carbon?
“It’s not about a big company or small company,” says Trenga. “There's a differentiation and a commercial impact that can be taken advantage of by companies that are willing to make that change. You're going to win more projects, sell more product, commercially benefit the revenue and the profitability to a company by being a leader and being a better steward to the environment.”
It sounds good to be a leader, but it can be expensive to get started. Just one environmental product declaration can cost $10,000 or more. However, now there’s financial help from the government for building product manufacturers to conduct a lifecycle assessment analysis (LCA) and create the environmental product declarations (EPDs) needed to assess and demonstrate their products’ environmental impact and embodied carbon. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) included nearly $10 billion allocated to help reduce embodied carbon and $250 million for the Environmental Product Declaration Assistance Program. Plus, the General Service Administration now requires EPDs for its suppliers.
It’s more than just setting long-range goals.
It's easy to set targets for reducing embodied carbon, especially if those goals are more than a decade or two away. Benchmarking and goal-setting beyond your current workforce’s career longevity might not be enough of a motivator to turn those targets into reality.
“If we set aggressive targets and we really challenge ourselves and put these kind of moon shot ideas on the board, you'll see results really fast,” says Trenga. “Instead of kicking the problems down the road, the mindset has to shift. We have to solve them today.”
Learn more about Kingspan and embodied carbon at Kingspan.com.
