Embodied Carbon

Designing for energy efficiency to reduce emissions is standard green building practice, but the underlying carbon emitted in extracting, manufacturing and transporting building materials is still commonly ignored. Expanding the scope of urban green building concerns to embodied carbon can be daunting for local governments, but one way to make it more feasible is to integrate it with well-established policy pathways in waste, equity and preservation. This approach also taps into long-standing commitments from a broad suite of interest groups, helping to galvanize momentum for what appears on its surface to be a purely technical concern.