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Thursday, March 27, 2025
Advances in Carbon Accounting for Buildings
Oregon Ballroom 202Moderator:
Georgia's Expanded Carbon Registry
In 2021, Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB 355 into law, expanding Georgia’s existing carbon registry for timber products to include sustainable building materials contained within buildings. The first project on the registry, 619 Ponce, a mass timber building in Atlanta, is demonstrating a new way to value the benefits of timber construction. Sam Culpepper of Southface, the third-party verifier for the project, will discuss the benefits of the Registry, as well as the requisite LCA process and benefits of registering buildings for credits.
Data-Driven Evaluation of the Embodied Carbon Benefits of Mass Timber
In 2023, our firm embarked on an expansive benchmarking study, completing 97 Whole-Building Life Cycle Assessments to validate a set of priority embodied carbon reduction measures. This study includes 10 mass timber projects across a variety of use types. All projects assessed represent completed designs, quantity takeoffs are based on high-resolution BIM Models, and the LCA studies follow a set methodology, addressing discrepancies commonly found in embodied carbon benchmarks.
For this study, we separated the projects’ biogenic carbon data from fossil emissions. We found that even when biogenic carbon is reported separately from our projects’ fossil impacts, our mass timber work is typically lower in upfront embodied carbon than projects built from other primary structural materials. These findings, accompanied by circular approaches to end of use for mass timber, demonstrate that flexible, enduring mass timber designs can support significant impact reduction and long-term carbon storage.
New York City Mass Timber Studio: A Case Study for Utilizing Mass Timber in Harlem
As part of the inaugural NYC Mass Timber Studio climate innovation program, sponsored by NYC/EDC, the Mass Timber in Harlem case study, led by architects at atelierjones, evaluates the viability of utilizing a mass timber superstructure instead of an existing concrete design on a seven-story residential building in Harlem, New York. Following the design of the mass timber building, DCI led the WBLCA analysis, working with atelierjones, Pliteq, and Swinerton to achieve the program goal of also evaluating the climate impacts of mass timber on projects located in NYC, while considering the environmental justice concerns of those communities.
This presentation will examine how switching from concrete framing to a mass timber/light-gauge steel hybrid structure helped the project team achieve significant embodied carbon and cost reductions. Additionally, the case study will compare the whole building life cycle assessment data of four different mass timber floor assemblies compared to the existing concrete design, with a focus on using an alternative dry-assembly instead of traditional gypsum concrete. Along with environmental impact results, lessons learned from the design and WBLCA process will be shared, as well as opportunities for future embodied carbon reductions and economic drivers.
