Carbon Group Post 5: Wood

Perhaps you’ve noticed that big wood-framed buildings are in the news lately:        The City of Portland granted a building permit for a 12-story cross-laminated timber (CLT) tower this year.        SOM developed a “concrete-jointed timber frame” system which they say could be used to construct a 42-story tower.        The first large...

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Carbon Group Publication: Structural Materials and Global Climate

Our publication Structural Materials and Global Climate is now available for purchase! ...

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Project: Thermal Break Strategies for Cladding Systems in Building Structures

Check out this developing project! http://www.coe.neu.edu/Research/thermal-breaks/project_summary.ht...

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Carbon Group Post 4: Do you know how to achieve a carbon-efficient steel-framed building? Your fabricator does.

A common misconception within the Architecture/Engineering/Construction community is that structural steel is a carbon-intense, “dirty” product which sabotages the natural environment by utilizing large amounts of mined content.  In reality, the steel structure being fabricated for your current project has a decent chance of containing metal from a car similar to the one you were driving when...

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Carbon Group Post 3: Example Demonstrating How SCMs Can Reduce Embodied Impacts of a Concrete Building

This is the third in a planned series of blog posts on topics that are discussed in depth in the SEI Sustainability Committee’s forthcoming technical report, Building Structure and Global Climate, due out later this year. In this example, a cradle-to-gate LCA was conducted to determine the embodied impacts of concrete on a building to compare the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of a reference...

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Carbon Group Post 2: What About the Data?

Carbon Group Post 2: What About the Data? This is the second in a planned series of blog posts on topics that are discussed in depth in the SEI Sustainability Committee’s forthcoming technical report, Building Structure and Global Climate, due out later this year. As with all analyses, the quality of environmental assessment results depends greatly on the quality of the input data. What we learned in our earliest structural engineering and computer programming courses holds true: garbage...

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Carbon Group Post 1: Why Climate Change Matters

Structural Materials and Global Climate: Why Climate Change Matters The Carbon Task Group of the Structural Engineering Institute’s Sustainability Committee has spent years studying the ways structural materials and systems affect climate change. This is the first of a planned series of blog posts on topics discussed in depth in our forthcoming technical report. Why should we care about climate...

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