The #1 Sustainability Program Blind Spot
If your not addressing embodied carbon, your only 3/4 the way there
When we talk about 39% of the worlds emissions coming from the built environment, we often focus almost exclusively on the 75% of those emissions that are the result of our operations. The energy consumption associated with operations. In 2019, however we finally began to again mention the other 25% - the emissions from the built environment that are embedded in the materials we use for our buildings.
In the early 1990’s, a committee looking at new construction began exploring the idea of a “green building”, promoting a more holistic and integrated design process that recognized the environmental impacts of new construction. What emerged from that committee we now call LEED. While LEED has evolved significantly since version 1, one thing that version 1 did emphasize was the importance of materials and resources and their contribution towards the environmental impact of new construction. As LEED evolved, the emphasis tilted more towards operational impacts, but those early efforts resurfaced in 2018 in the form of a conversation around embodied carbon.
The conversation around Embodied Carbon concerns that other 25%, those emissions related to the materials used in creating our buildings, including the impacts of material extraction, manufacturing, and transporting those materials to the job site. While it may seem like focusing on 11% of the global emissions is focusing on a small percentage of the source of emissions, it is material and especially because of the urgency of climate change. The emissions we produce between now and 2050 play a very large role in the general trajectory of the overall global impact. Think of it as a snowball rolling down a hill, the longer it rolls downhill, the more momentum it has and the greater the amount of snow it carries when it finally reaches the bottom of the hill. The bottom line is if we do not include the consideration of embodied carbon into our overall reduction strategy, we will not meet our targets.
So what does this mean to sustainability professionals? It means we have a larger role to play in ensuring that our strategy includes not just operational impacts, but supply chain impacts as well. This means working with designers, architects, and procurement to require the inclusion of supply chain impacts when acquiring building materials and designing specifications. It means evaluating both the products and the vendors providing those products, a holistic view of the entire process.
Let’s think a moment about the largest retailer in the world. I promise, there is a point here. While we all hear about the second largest retailer, Amazon, the largest remains Wal Mart. 58 years ago, Sam and James “Bud” Walton founded this giant, but what was the secret sauce to building a company that in 2019 grossed nearly $519 billion dollars in revenue? It boils down to a relentless and precise management of inventory and specifically their supply chain. James Crowell, Director of the Supply Chain Management Research Center at the Walton College of Business has said, “I don’t believe there is a university in the world that doesn’t talk about Wal Mart and the supply chain.”
So why is this important? As early as 2009, Wal Mart launched it’s Sustainability Index, essentially a supplier questionnaire. This index goes beyond asking suppliers for the price of their product, it also gathers and analyzes information about a supplier’s approach to managing it’s social and environmental impact on the full life cycle of its products.
At the heart of the supplier questionnaire are essentially three questions:
Do you measure and set goals for your environmental impacts?
If so, what impacts are you measuring, what are your goals, and are they consistent with recognized standards?
Do you know if your suppliers are doing the same?
By taking the lesson taught by arguably the most successful supply chain manager in the world, this same concept can be applied in our own sustainability programs to address embodied carbon. We already ask suppliers for their price, we typically ask for their terms and conditions, why are we not asking if they can also support our sustainability goals? Why are we asking if they are working towards our goals or against our goals in their own organizations?
Fortunately, the reemergence of evaluating materials and resources has resulted in new tools being developed that can be added to our supplier questionnaires to further help identify where embodied carbon is entering into portfolios. To get a general idea of what embodied carbon is there are several free resources available, such as the Bath Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE). The Carbon Leadership Forum is also an excellent place to begin understanding what embodied carbon is, how to identify it, and how to reduce it.
As you become more familiar with embodied carbon, the tool of choice is the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD). Just as LEED initiated the conversation around materials and supplies many decades ago, the green building certification program has again emerged as a thought leader through LEED v4.1 with changes to Materials and Resources Credits that address embodied carbon, and importantly outlines the use of the EPD as a tool to conduct this analysis.
Back to our role in identifying reducing the impact of our portfolios, this all comes full circle in the development of metrics around measuring the impact of embodied carbon within your own portfolio. Through the tools discussed: surveys, EDP’s, and specifications we are able to start to measure and assign reduction targets to our embodied carbon.
To accomplish this, sustainability leaders must be willing to collaborate within their own organizations. We have likely become comfortable talking to operations about efficiency improvements and in many organizations we have established ourselves with the asset managers. However, have you established a relationship with procurement? If your organization also develops properties, how about the design team? Establishing these relationships will be critical in evaluating the impact of the supply chain on your organization.
Much like our discussion around data coverage in a previous post, getting the data is a key step. The survey concept is a way to start to get data. Organizations that are tracking both operational carbon impacts and embodied carbon impacts are organizations differentiating themselves from their competition. When investors are looking at where their funds will be responsibly invested, a more holistic approach will inspire more confidence then a narrower approach.
You can help reduce the impact of the built environment by sharing this blog with your peers. Together we can impact the 39% of greenhouse gasses attributed to the built environment. It starts with awareness and we succeed with teamwork.
Stay well!
Chris Laughman is the author of the ThirtyNine Blog, a blog dedicated to reducing the impact of the built environment. When not blogging, Chris is helping multifamily properties reduce their energy and water impact as a senior account manager at Bright Power. A full service energy strategy company, Bright Power is a leading provider of energy efficiency, renewable energy and energy management solutions for the real estate industry. We use our Find-Fix-Follow approach to Find the best opportunities across a real estate portfolio, deploy the Fixes on specific assets, and Follow to ensure long term value, always optimizing for your financial and sustainability goals. Contact me at claughman@brightpower.com for more information.
Hi Chris, great post. I like that you highlight the importance of embedded emissions. But I wonder why you don't also point to the emissions generated by occupants (residents, workers, shoppers, etc) moving back and forth to properties as they go about living their lives. Research has show that these transportation emissions are as large as or even greater than the emissions generated by operational processes, such as tenant energy use. Real estate developers and investors play a big role in shaping how real estate assets (residential, commercial, office, etc) are distributed in space, which heavily influences transportation patterns. In my mind, this is the biggest blind spot in the discussion about real estate sustainability today because emissions generated by personal vehicles moving to and from homes, offices, shops, and so on is one of the largest contributors of emissions in the country. Would love to hear what you think about this.