Unboxing Carbon

The last decade has seen a wellspring of vocabulary around sustainability emerge and gain prominence. But though we seem to have gained the language, how much do we really know about the carbon footprint of our projects? And how can we trim that footprint in the design process? Material selection, the realm of the designer, can make a big difference leading to measurable environmental savings.

Project details

Typology

Climate adaptation

Status

Ongoing

Discipline

Research and innovation

40% of global emissions are associated with the construction industry, with pre-construction phases accounting for a staggering 11% of them. Referred to as upfront carbon, these phases include extraction, production, and transportation of materials.

With ‘Unboxing Carbon’ we have developed a course and collection of open-source catalogs that provide teams with the knowledge and tools to evaluate building materials based on their upfront carbon, that is their environmental impact pre-construction.

You might ask why we focus our attention on emissions associated with pre-construction phases. You’re asking a very good question.

The latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports show that if we are to limit temperature increase to 1.5ºC, we must act now, reducing emissions by 43% within this decade, compared to 2019. With this in mind, calculating the environmental impact across the lifetime of a project, would mean turning a blind eye toward its environmental cost today.

Rasmus Hjortshøj, 2023

There are good strategies for designing buildings with the lowest possible carbon footprints and simultaneously planning regenerative landscaping. However, these require a new intelligence in design and this is where the need for carbon literate architects comes in.

This two-part course aims to provide designers, architects, and industry peers with the knowledge and tools to calculate and understand the upfront carbon of construction materials.

Course

This two-part course aims to provide designers, architects, and industry peers with the knowledge and tools to calculate and understand the upfront carbon of construction materials.

Base course

The base course introduces the principles of measuring carbon emissions, understanding the global implications of climate change, and conversing intelligibly with clients on decarbonization regulations and possibilities. The course includes a workshop with materials to support participants’ understanding of embodied carbon.

Data course

The expanded course introduces the principles of measuring carbon emissions, finding, understanding and working with the available data. The course includes a workshop with hands-on experience using EPD (Environmental Product Declarations) data to understand materials and their carbon impacts per m2. Course material includes Henning Larsen’s templates in Excel and InDesign, which provide the framework for your team to produce the first pages of your own Material Carbon Catalog. As part of the course fee, this initial work will also be quality controlled.

Download the full course description below.

The projects, materials and exhibits represent our small but scalable steps as we progress towards a desirable future through research, testing and continuous learning. Copenhagen School of Design & Technology, 2024

Catalogs

The open-source catalogs are a collection of architectural materials presenting complex data from Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) in a visually accessible way, and in a unit that is readily understandable for architects: by square meter. The Catalogs are intended to give architects the means of assessing global warming potential (GWP) in the product production phases, thus aligning projects currently on the drawing boards with the recommendations of the latest IPCC report.

Download the latest catalogs on both exterior and interior materials at the bottom of this page.

The Catalogs are organized by building component categories and presents the material with the lowest CO2e impacts on the left of the page. The data is derived from currently valid product-specific or branch organization EPDs available in Northern European EPD databases such as EPD Danmark, EPD Norge, IBU, and International EPD. Each catalog entry lists the source of data (a hyperlinked EPD number), the thickness of the material, and the total GWP in A1 to A3 phases, per square meter.

Despite efforts to ensure accuracy in the reproduction of data and hyperlinks, errors can slip through. Please let us know at carbon@henninglarsen.com.