Rocky Mountain Institute carbon-free buildings manager Chris Magwood walks through RMI research on manufacturing building products from upcycled agricultural biomass and other undervalued byproducts. He shows single-family and multifamily projects, from straw bale high-rises to hempcrete towers, where those materials bank hundreds of tons of carbon.
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Mike Collignon: All right. Happy Wednesday everyone. Did you know that July is National anti boredom Month. Well Greenville the media is about as anti boredom as you can get. So I hope you are prepared for an enlightening and entertaining time. Our topic for today is carbon storage and homebuilding. Now we're going to discuss a recent study from the Rocky Mountain Institute that explores manufacturing building products from upcycled biomass and turning them into undervalued, byproducts, but into, valuable carbon storing products for homebuilders across the United States.
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Mike Collignon: So this is a really fascinating way to kind of reuse and upcycle that we're going to talk about today. And here is, with us is is Chris Mag Wood. Now, you may remember him from a prior webinar, but in case you weren't here for that, he is the manager of carbon free buildings at Rocky Mountain Institute, and the Director of Homebuilders can now.
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Mike Collignon: Chris joined Ami's Carbon Free Buildings team in 2022. He leads efforts on Homebuilders Kitchen, which is a unique community of practice for homebuilders working to decarbonize in the development of the ResNet Ansi standard and 1550 for the measurement and reporting of embodied carbon for homes. Now, earlier in Chris's career, he helped to establish builders for Climate action. He's been leading development of the Beam Carbon Estimator tool for low rise construction.
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Mike Collignon: He ran a design build firm specializing in carbon storing, healthy, energy efficient new construction and renovations. And he's also had a hand in authoring seven books on sustainable building. So Chris has been a very busy guy. Now I want to make sure to recognize our sponsors for this wonderful webinar. The first one is carrier. Now they are founded by the inventor of modern air conditioning, and they are now recognized globally as a leader in high technology, heating, air conditioning and refrigeration solutions.
00:01:53:00 - 00:02:17:02
Mike Collignon: The company's legacy began way back in 1902, when Willis Carrier invented modern air conditioning, and since then, carrier has continued to innovate in the Hvac space, understanding that today's homes serve multiple functions such as offices and maybe mean gyms and entertainment hubs, carrier designed smart features tailored to how people live, work, and play regardless of how a space is used.
00:02:17:02 - 00:02:43:19
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Mike Collignon: Mohawk's approach to sustainability optimizes every point in the product cycle, from raw material sourcing to manufacturing, distribution, and all the way down to reclamation. This approach is designed to minimize the consumption of natural resources and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And finally, for more than 30 years, Trex Company has invented, reinvented and defined the composite decking category. Today, the company is the world's number one brand of sustainably made wood alternative decking and railing, and the leader in high performance, low maintenance outdoor living products.
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Mike Collignon: Trex is the only brand to be recognized as Green Builder Media's sustainable brand leader 14 years in a row. If you're counting at home, that's every year the survey has been conducted. All right now, during the course of today's presentation, you can submit questions for Chris. Simply use that Q&A function that you see near the bottom of the zoom window.
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Mike Collignon: I'm going to review those questions and post those to him after his presentation. All right Chris, welcome back to the webinar series.
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Chris Magwood: Thanks. Thanks for the intro. Thanks to the sponsors. And, while I get my, slide show up here, hoping everybody is seeing that. Okay. Yeah. Thanks to everybody who has taken this, oops, out of your day to, come and spend some time with hearing about and, ideally asking some questions about, carbon storing, building materials.
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Chris Magwood: So, our embodied carbon team at RMI has sort of, informally adopted this slogan, emit less and store more. You may have heard me speak in the past about the, emit less part, and reducing embodied carbon. This one is focused more on the the store more part, where we're looking at, you know, how we can put, carbon into buildings, make those buildings act like carbon sinks or carbon banks.
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Chris Magwood: And to do it with, you know, the best types of, of biomass that we can use. So, yeah, just, you already heard a little intro of me, so I'll be very brief on this. But I come from a, a long background, 25 years in residential, design and build. Got my start as a straw mill builder and have, you know, lots of actual hands on experience with quite a few of the, the kind of, products and materials we're going to talk about today and, did run a, a design build school for about 15 years.
00:05:20:12 - 00:05:49:23
Chris Magwood: And, I call myself an accidental embodied carbon nerd. Really? Because I didn't set out to, specifically look at embodied carbon. But in our building practice, we did really set out to try to make sure that we could quantify the things that we were telling our clients we were doing well. So in the, you know, realm of green building, you know that that includes everything from energy efficiency to indoor air quality to, you know, waste handling.
00:05:49:29 - 00:06:26:03
Chris Magwood: And, you know, as as that business progressed, I realized it would be good to know the carbon footprint of the materials that we're putting into buildings and understanding that climate impact and being able to give our clients, some, you know, actual data that shows that we're, you know, improving and doing better for them. And that was the start of, what's been, I think, about a 12 year, trip down the carbon rabbit hole, which has been great and productive, in no small part, because it's really helped me to kind of understand the importance of carbon storage in buildings.
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Chris Magwood: And that's what we're going to be talking about today. And then also just briefly, about RMI, we are, you know, traditionally, I guess we would be called a think tank. We kind of, put our own twist on that and call ourselves a think do scale tank. But as you can see on the screen, there's over 700 people at RMI, and we get involved in, a lot of different parts of the, the, the clean economy, the clean energy transition.
00:06:54:29 - 00:07:21:14
Chris Magwood: And, I'm located, in our carbon free buildings team. But we have a lot of expertise in a lot of other areas as well. Okay. So I'm going to, get started. I think probably a lot of people here understand what embodied carbon is, but because it's such a terrible term and, and in particular, when we start talking about carbon storage, it can get a bit confusing.
00:07:21:19 - 00:07:43:27
Chris Magwood: So I'm just going to sort of level set off the beginning here, around what I mean when I say embodied carbon, and that is the emissions that occur, over the lifecycle of a product, or when you put a bunch of products together, the building that they, that they create and in particular, I'm going to be talking about the product stage emissions.
00:07:43:29 - 00:08:10:01
Chris Magwood: So you can see in the little, light blue box there, that we are, looking at the emissions or in the case of carbon storage materials, the carbon storage that happens, you know, in the raw materials to the to the time that the product is sort of, at the factory gate and ready to be shipped out to, to a building site, obviously there's a lot more to the lifecycle than just that.
00:08:10:03 - 00:08:29:14
Chris Magwood: But, as Lloyd Alter says, these are like the now emissions, the today emissions, the upfront piece. And so that's going to be the focus of what we're talking about. Towards the end of the presentation and during the Q&A and I'm happy to talk about, other phases of this, of the lifecycle.
00:08:29:16 - 00:08:52:14
Chris Magwood: So one of the first things that struck me when I did my very first embodied carbon analysis, of a building, one of the buildings, that I was designing and constructing was just how shockingly large the total was for that. The, you know, the emissions that that building, was responsible for when you added up all the different products we were putting into the building.
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Chris Magwood: You know, my first answers were like 20 tons, 30 tons. And that seemed really big. And, and that's what drove me to keep looking at this. And so it turns out that, you know, 30 to 40 to 45 tons per house is not at all unusual. That tends to be, about where the average is. And so if you kind of take that number and multiply it by the number of new homes that get built in the US, you're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 80 million tons of emissions happen, just in the US, just from manufacturing the products that go into new homes.
00:09:30:00 - 00:09:55:07
Chris Magwood: This isn't apartment buildings or any other kind of building. This is sort of low rise residential construction. That number seemed big to me when I first calculated it out. It turns out that, you know, if you if you look at some of the countries on on the slide here, that, that that is a carbon footprint equivalent to the entire economies of some pretty, you know, developed and, and large countries like Austria, Greece, Hungary and Norway.
00:09:55:07 - 00:10:38:11
Chris Magwood: So, you know, as somebody in that building industry, to me this says, well, there's this is something that we really need to kind of take responsibility for and, and work on, so what I'm going to talk about today is, is the way that that carbon storage figures into being able to reduce embodied carbon. And I think the, the, the analogy that I, that I try to use is, you know, because people are more familiar with, with operational, energy reduction and operational emission reduction, you know, when you are creating a building, you know, we're trying to get the energy use as small as possible.
00:10:38:13 - 00:11:16:10
Chris Magwood: We're trying to minimize the emissions from those energy sources. So, you know, tending more towards, electricity and ideally electricity from renewables. But every building is always going to have, you know, some emissions associated with operating it. And you don't you don't really get to zero unless you know, you're using renewables. That's kind of that the, the negative number that you can use if you especially if you can overproduce for the building and you're feeding, electricity back into the grid for others to use, that's how you get from minimal emissions, you know, down to zero emissions.
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Chris Magwood: And there, you know, it's not a perfect analogy, but the same kind of holds with the embodied carbon side of things, where there are a lot of things we're going to put into buildings for a long time. Still, including glass and concrete and, you know, metals like steel and aluminum that even though, you know, those industries are working at reducing their carbon footprint, they are going to have a carbon footprint, for, you know, the foreseeable future.
00:11:41:15 - 00:12:13:00
Chris Magwood: And we're probably going to continue to need those products for the foreseeable future. Carbon storing materials, you know, if you can minimize the amount of, of the products with embodied carbon and pick the ones that have the lowest embodied carbon, that's you're getting that initial footprint down to as small a number as possible. And then really, it's the carbon storing materials that, you know, are able to to get you to a, a net zero or beyond by by storing carbon and kind of becoming that the equivalent of renewable energy on them.
00:12:13:02 - 00:12:40:11
Chris Magwood: On the materials front. And so, you know, when I first came across the term negative emissions, a dozen years ago when I was, you know, diving into embodied carbon, that that term really threw me for a bit of a loop was like, well, what what are negative emissions? How can you negatively emit something? And really what the term is, is covering is carbon dioxide that's been drawn out of the atmosphere.
00:12:40:11 - 00:13:10:21
Chris Magwood: And by and large, when we're talking about this for buildings, we're talking about plant based materials. So, you know, if you cast your mind back to a high school, science class and photosynthesis, you'll know that when plants photosynthesize, what they're doing is taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and you're breaking, that, up. And the oxygen is released by the plant and the carbon stays and is, you know, an essential part of that, literally the body of the plant.
00:13:10:21 - 00:13:32:23
Chris Magwood: And so every plant that's growing on the planet is a little, now that we use the term carbon dioxide removal or CBR, we tend to think about Cd-R as something that machines do or, you know, that happens in, in a, you know, sort of mechanical way. But really plants are that OG Cd-R. Machines on the planet.
00:13:32:25 - 00:13:56:02
Chris Magwood: They're constantly drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere in, in most cases for a lot of the products I'm going to be talking about today, the business as usual pathway is that the CO2 that those plants have absorbed is almost immediately rereleased to the atmosphere, and that's great because that's the carbon cycle that the planet has been, you know, using for, billions of years.
00:13:56:04 - 00:14:17:07
Chris Magwood: CO2 comes out of the atmosphere as plants grow. CO2 goes back to the atmosphere as they are, rotted, eaten, burned, you know, in some way, digested. And the CO2 goes back and there's, you know, been that cycle, all along, you know, humans have come along and put a whole lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it wasn't part of that loop.
00:14:17:09 - 00:14:42:15
Chris Magwood: And plants continue to draw that CO2 down. So when we're talking about using biomass in building materials, what we're really doing is trying to interrupt that carbon cycle, that natural carbon cycle, by taking as much of the carbon that plants have drawn out of the atmosphere and putting it somewhere basically safe, safe and durable, which is, you know, building, we have lots of need for buildings.
00:14:42:15 - 00:15:03:24
Chris Magwood: We have lots of need for building products. And if, those building products can go from being carbon emitting products to products that store carbon over the lifetime of the building, then especially cumulatively, as you add that up in buildings, we can store an awful lot of carbon, that carbon that, you know, was about to go back to the atmosphere instead stays in buildings.
00:15:04:00 - 00:15:33:04
Chris Magwood: And we try to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which helps reduce the impact of climate change. So that's then the sort of underlying principle of building with biomass is that, you know, the stuff already grows. Instead of letting that carbon go. We're basically holding on to it. We're banking it in a building for, depending on the product, anywhere from a decade to a century, if we, you know, build our buildings well, make them easy to disassemble, make them easy to recycle and reuse.
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Chris Magwood: You know, maybe that's actually a couple of centuries. But that that time window is actually a pretty critical one for, you know, the trajectory our climate is on and putting carbon in buildings, for the next bunch of decades, it is, you know, one of the, the sort of best interventions I think we can be making, to help the climate.
00:15:55:16 - 00:16:19:12
Chris Magwood: So to translate those negative emission numbers into actual products, I'm just going to give you a quick sample here. These are, numbers that come out of the, the beam software, which is a free tool for looking at the carbon footprint of, building materials for residential buildings. I mean, a quick model and being looking at a 2020ft² of wall area.
00:16:19:15 - 00:16:57:26
Chris Magwood: This is actually the dois, you know, model single family home for the US at an R value of R 20. So basically a two by six wall, a standard two by six wall, with our 20 bat insulation in it. And just to sort of give you a sense that, the first column here are the emissions and you so you can see that even though, you know, obviously every product is going to have emissions, no matter whether you're using biomass or, you know, any other source of raw material, the act of harvesting that, transporting it, transforming it into factory, you know, there is always a carbon footprint associated with that.
00:16:57:26 - 00:17:21:18
Chris Magwood: And you can see, you know, with, the the exception of, of Hempcrete here, all of those numbers are pretty close to being, you know, in line with each other in terms of the input emissions that it takes to make something. But then the next column is, is sort of where the negative numbers come in. That is literally the, the amount of carbon in the biomass in that product.
00:17:21:18 - 00:17:47:17
Chris Magwood: So to figure that out, you know, there are average, weights for carbon. So, you know, different, different types of plant matter will have a different percentage of carbon as part of their overall weight. It's usually somewhere between 40 and 50% of the, you know, the total mass of a of a plant is carbon. But anyway, in the tool each each type of plant is is attributed its actual, amount of carbon stored.
00:17:47:19 - 00:18:12:29
Chris Magwood: And so you can see in the quantity of, of insulation that it would take for this first one, which is hemp wool. That's there's about 1000kg of carbon stored in that material. There were 760 odd kilograms of emissions emitted to make that material. So, you know, if you if you sort of do the net on that, there's some carbon storage of about 308kg.
00:18:13:06 - 00:18:32:23
Chris Magwood: And so you can see the comparative numbers. This isn't, you know, that this webinars and sort of meant to dive right into like product by product analysis. But I wanted to kind of, you know, set everybody up by sort of seeing what this looks like. Because one of the questions people have, it's like, well, sure, you know, if there's carbon in this thing, but don't the emissions sort of outweigh it?
00:18:32:23 - 00:18:54:26
Chris Magwood: And so this is, you know, an attempt to kind of show that, well know in many of the products that the amount of carbon stored is greater than the emissions, that went into making the product. And ideally, you know, the better, the better that ratio is, the more effective that product is as a carbon storage medium in our buildings.
00:18:54:28 - 00:19:27:04
Chris Magwood: So, over the past year, at RMI, I've been working with a couple colleagues on this project, building with biomass, where we wanted to see, well, you know, how much carbon could new American housing stock hold if we, you know, identified lots of different products? That could go in if we made models that really accurately represented, the types of houses, you know, the, the, the size, the number of stories, the garage size, you know, all of the, the variables that went into the product.
00:19:27:04 - 00:19:48:17
Chris Magwood: So we kind of took, all the housing census data and ended up making 40 different models and, each, you know, if any model represented more than a 10th of a percent of all US houses, we we sort of made it as a, as an individual model. And then we made a baseline model that kind of uses typical materials, conventional materials.
00:19:48:20 - 00:20:09:20
Chris Magwood: And then we made a carbon storage model where we sort of were like, what if we could pack in all of the carbon storing products that, you know, are feasible to, to include in a home? What does that look like on a one home basis? And then what does that look like if we spread it out, across the entire, housing stock that's built every year.
00:20:09:23 - 00:20:31:18
Chris Magwood: So to begin with, we we took all of those 40 models and made, a sort of business as usual model for that. And you can see, you know, there was a, a range of results depending on the size of house, the type of house, you know, some of the more concrete homes, some of them are wood frame, some of them are three stories, some of them are one story, some have a four car garage, some have no garage.
00:20:31:18 - 00:20:54:14
Chris Magwood: So, you know, lots of variables that, that change the, the, the, the overall intensity. But you can see, you know, the, the lowest emitting baseline model was about 25 pounds of CO2 per square foot of floor area. The highest was up around 44. And our average, you know, fell in this sort of 34 pounds per square foot range.
00:20:54:17 - 00:21:22:07
Chris Magwood: That was pretty much bang on with, lots of real world examples that we've also modeled. So that just sort of came as no surprise. This was, about what we, expected. And, you know, that the current rate of building new homes, which is, just about one point 9,000,000,000ft² of new home construction every year, you know, that's a total of 28.9 million tons of emissions coming from, you know, our, our sort of models here.
00:21:22:09 - 00:21:41:07
Chris Magwood: So that's about 36 tons of emissions per house and, you know, multiply it across all the homes. It's 28.9 million tons of emissions. So that's that was kind of our baseline model to compare with. There's lots of juggling around. We could have done with that baseline model. It could have looked much worse. And in fact my guess is it probably is.
00:21:41:07 - 00:22:08:03
Chris Magwood: We chose, you know, materials from the kind of lower end of the of the business as usual spectrum. You know, we just want it to be, as fair to, to business as usual as we can. But anyway, that's the, that's what the baseline kind of looked like. And then for our carbon story models, we wanted to, you know, set some really realistic criteria for the products that we were going to model in the building.
00:22:08:06 - 00:22:32:17
Chris Magwood: The first one was that, you know, the product had to be something that's already manufactured at a factory scale. So there's lots of really cool stuff out there that people are, you know, tinkering with and innovating with. But, you know, unless we could find it didn't have to be in the US, but somewhere in the world, we had to be like, yes, you know, this thing is made at the scale of a factory and therefore, you know, the process is already in place.
00:22:32:17 - 00:22:55:10
Chris Magwood: And we know that we could, see that that entered the marketplace, you know, in a sort of large, large scale way. So that was one criteria. The next criteria was that the feedstock for that biomass building, material had to be available in the US. So that meant we did not model, a bunch of things that are often, you know, in the mix when you're looking at a biomass building.
00:22:55:10 - 00:23:16:08
Chris Magwood: So, you know, we don't grow bamboo in the US or not in any appreciable quantity. Cork is is another one, you know, so there were some products, anything with coconut or, sugar cane bagasse, you know, there's there are all kinds of building products out there that use those. Some of them are pretty well known. You know, Cork flooring, cork siding.
00:23:16:10 - 00:23:50:26
Chris Magwood: So but we did not include them because what we were trying to to do is identify, you know, biomass, grown in the US, that could be, that could be used here. And then our last criteria and it was an important one, for that, that, that verification of the study, but also a sort of limiting one, is that every product that we modeled had to have a verified EPD or environmental product declaration, and that's kind of then the standard document that's used to both show the emissions associated with the product and the carbon storage in that product.
00:23:50:28 - 00:24:24:01
Chris Magwood: So again, there are all kinds of really cool products that meet the other two requirements that did not sort of pass that threshold. And you know, if we repeated this study in two years, we might find a whole bunch of products, then have EPD, and our results would get even better. So the good thing about limiting to this, you know, this section of this criteria selection is that it feels like quite realistic, that you could build homes this way, that you could expand the growth of them because the feedstock exists in the country and that we actually know what the, what the carbon footprint is.
00:24:24:01 - 00:24:53:16
Chris Magwood: We're not guessing or, or of projecting. We have pretty good grounds to, to base that on. So now you can sort of see what, what the results is. So here, I'm looking at just the gross storage, not not the combined. We'll get to the, the, the combined, emissions versus storage, but this is sort of like, how much cdr could we, could we, you know, squeeze out of this home if we put a lot of these products in.
00:24:53:18 - 00:25:13:24
Chris Magwood: And again, you'll see there's a range because the home types were different. And you'll see that the the range is almost identical to the, to the baseline. Just on the other side of the zero line. So, you know, in the lowest case, example, there was 26, pounds per square foot of cedar available in the best one, 40 pounds.
00:25:13:24 - 00:25:37:27
Chris Magwood: The average is 32. So it's you know, what we're saying is there's almost as much room for novel cedar in these homes as there is emissions from the current home. So, you know, rather than, you know, being responsible for 28.9 million tons of emissions, we could literally be storing 27.7 million tons of carbon in materials for those homes.
00:25:37:27 - 00:26:01:24
Chris Magwood: And so it's, you know, you can see it's almost the exact inverse of the, of the business as usual. Now, if we combine those two things, if we, you know, for the carbon storage model, if we look at the the net between storage and emissions, the picture, you know, looks different. And even even with the most amount of carbon storing materials, our highest models still had very low.
00:26:01:24 - 00:26:31:08
Chris Magwood: But, you know, actual, countable emissions. On the positive side, our best case example, you know, was net carbon storing by quite a bit. And the average was just just barely net carbon storing. So that means, you know, that the, the, the, the volume of carbon storage I'm showing you here this 26 to 40 pounds per, per square foot, you know, turns into a net, of about just under 20 500kg per home.
00:26:31:11 - 00:26:52:09
Chris Magwood: So, you know, if we did all the net calculations, our building stock could go from, you know, emitting about 30 million tons a year to to, you know, going just below zero, above half a million tons of net storage in our buildings. And you can look at you can look at the picture. Either way, some people really want to keep emissions and storage separate.
00:26:52:09 - 00:27:11:06
Chris Magwood: So that's why we showed it to you that way. Because the, you know, the, the, the actual amount of carbon stored is not this net number. But some people want to see the net. So either way, you know, you can see there's a, there's a major impact potential on the, the carbon footprint of the construction world.
00:27:11:06 - 00:27:32:29
Chris Magwood: So, you know, I said early on that new construction in the US has a carbon footprint equivalent to some European countries. This would eliminate that. So even if we are not achieving huge amounts of net storage, we are essentially, you know, able to see a path to completely, eliminating the net carbon footprint from new housing. And that's significant.
00:27:32:29 - 00:28:05:25
Chris Magwood: It would be like, you know, turning off Norway and it no longer emits. So, this is this is, you know, a really for me, I really exciting pathway to being able to, address building emissions. Some other, some other, you know, insights that came out of the study. I know for a lot of people there's question and happy to get into this in the Q&A about, you know, the the durability of biomass materials and, you know, all kinds of things, how they appear, you know, what do they look like?
00:28:05:28 - 00:28:28:26
Chris Magwood: What was interesting is that, you know, the vast amount of the the storage available in these model homes, came from cavity insulation. So you can see, like, over all of the models, about just over a quarter of the carbon storage came from, cavity insulation. So that's basically, you know, wall and roof insulation. And some of the models have insulation in the floor as well.
00:28:28:26 - 00:28:51:11
Chris Magwood: If they're, a raised, raised foundation building. So, you know, that's a place where you can put a whole bunch of, carbon storage material. It also happens to be the the sort of, one of the areas that the product categories of which there are the most options already in the market right now. You can see that, interior walls.
00:28:51:11 - 00:29:14:00
Chris Magwood: So that's sort of the, the framing and the, the structure of interior walls. You could get about 20% of the total storage there, continuous insulation for the models in climate zones where, like a wrap of continuous insulation around the outside of the building is part of the model, that represents about 15% of the total storage.
00:29:14:02 - 00:29:35:06
Chris Magwood: We were, modeling with biochar, concrete aggregate, because that is a, a product available in the US, and it's manufactured here and has all of its, ASTM, approvals. That's about 10%. And so, you know, of all of these products and product categories shown here, they're all things that are kind of buried in the building.
00:29:35:06 - 00:29:57:19
Chris Magwood: You know, the the owner of the building, doesn't necessarily see or interact with any of these. The interior finishes, are the things that somebody would see, they're protected from the weather. So, you know, a lot of the concerns about biomass materials and, and, you know, harsh weather, you know, are averted. But that interior but these are the things people see.
00:29:57:19 - 00:30:25:24
Chris Magwood: So if you are a home builder and you wanted to put as much carbon storing, you know, stuff into a building as possible, you know, you could really concentrate on some areas like cavity insulation, like concrete aggregate, like, interior wall partition framing and, and, you know, get a huge amount of carbon storage, without your clients, you know, expectations of what their home look like, really changing very dramatically.
00:30:25:26 - 00:30:48:28
Chris Magwood: The other sort of leading question that tends to come up when we talk about these products is how much do they cost? You know, sure, we could, in theory put a bunch of this stuff into buildings. But what if, you know, does that make the building ridiculously expensive? And it's a valid concern because by and large, you know, most of the biomass materials that that are available today are from smaller manufacturers.
00:30:48:28 - 00:31:16:25
Chris Magwood: They are relatively new. They are not, recipients of, you know, the benefits of, scale of production. And, and so, you know, it was really interesting to do this costing, you know, we costed out the, the, the products from the business as usual model and found that, you know, in most of the in five of the seven product categories that we looked at, the there was a biomass material option that was within 5% of the cost of the, of the conventional option.
00:31:16:29 - 00:31:39:13
Chris Magwood: So, you know, I mean, 5% isn't nothing if you're adding 5% across a whole swath of materials, but in some cases, you know, they're actually the same. In some cases, they can even be a little bit lower. So, and there were only a couple of categories where, the price differential was a was a little bit bigger, getting, you know, up any that we used yellow anywhere, I think it was 20% more.
00:31:39:13 - 00:32:07:01
Chris Magwood: So, you know, again, if you're a builder looking to do this, you can sort of weigh up the options, go with the ones that are affordable today at parity or even maybe lower than, than a conventional option. And maybe you you don't do the ones that are slightly more expensive. But, you know, it was really great to see that, that there were so many options, you know, in the American market now where the price was, was very comparable.
00:32:07:03 - 00:32:44:24
Chris Magwood: One of the other leading insights here was that, you know, for, for a country that has been responsible for a huge amount of the innovation in a lot of these product categories. The manufacturing footprint in the U.S. right now is tiny compared to other countries, in particular European countries, and Australia far outnumber the US in terms of number of manufacturers, number of product types, across, you know, the whole spectrum here, you can sort of see, I don't know that there's really, anywhere where the, the US has more, manufacturing than, than elsewhere in the world.
00:32:44:24 - 00:33:22:18
Chris Magwood: So, you know, there's just a huge opportunity to take manufacturing processes that we already know work in other countries and import those into the United States and, and sort of be able to, produce, a whole lot more of these products here. And one of the other, you know, great sort of, things that we found in looking at this study was that there is about 400 million tons of what we called undervalued biomass, for which we can already identify products that are being manufactured somewhere in the world.
00:33:22:20 - 00:33:45:23
Chris Magwood: In our study, like I said, because we narrowed it down to things that had iPads, we were only looking at 32% of that biomass. There's a huge chunk. You know, the other 68%, a lot of it could be made into building products. They didn't have iPads and or we couldn't find a manufacturer. To, to sort of, you know, demonstrate the potential.
00:33:45:28 - 00:34:17:13
Chris Magwood: So they're left out of this study, but, there's a huge potential, especially in the amount of corn stover and corn cob that goes to, waste or incineration or combustion or rots in the US every year. To, to sort of transform that into building products, you would dramatically change the, the outcome of this study. You might double the amount of carbon that could be stored if we sort of, you know, opened the doors to, a few more of those innovative products.
00:34:17:15 - 00:34:38:27
Chris Magwood: Another, you know, thing that we realized was there are a whole kinds of innovative products. I had a really hard time just choosing for here. These are not necessarily like the top four, although I think they're all really, really interesting things. But, you know, there's so much innovation going on. In the US and in Canada, and actually around the world.
00:34:38:27 - 00:35:01:05
Chris Magwood: But I pick things that are going on in the US here. Products that, again, would radically transform the results of this, of this study. But there were no EPS for any of these products. So we couldn't we didn't include them in the study because we couldn't sort of provide, you know, detailed, you know, comparable, emissions and storage data.
00:35:01:05 - 00:35:23:29
Chris Magwood: But, you know, things like Prometheus, they're they're algae based cement has the potential to really radically change what the carbon footprint of concrete, which is about a third of the carbon footprint of most new homes, things like planted and their, their grass based, OSB replacement, agar board and their compressed straw, aka marks and their mycelium composite.
00:35:24:02 - 00:35:47:03
Chris Magwood: I mean, the list could go on and on. But, you know, we wanted to flag in this study that, hey, there's all this cool stuff. There's, you know, so much more potential than we're actually calculating here, just because we don't have the means to actually calculate these things. I'm assuming that that will start to change, quite quickly as these products get into manufacturing and then are able to produce CPGs.
00:35:47:06 - 00:36:24:01
Chris Magwood: You know, we'd be able to reproduce the study and add a whole lot more, product types into it. The other thing that we wanted to demonstrate in the study is that, you know, this isn't just, there aren't just climate benefits to doing this. There are some really major economic opportunities here. You know, if you are, if you're looking to be a manufacturer, if you can manufacture a high value product and if something that somebody else is currently considering a waste, you know, that's really low value, low cost raw material input into your into your product.
00:36:24:03 - 00:36:53:24
Chris Magwood: And, you know, if, if we scaled up the amount of manufacturing to meet the, the demand that we were sort of pointing to in this study, you know, we're talking 42,000 additional jobs, about $79 billion in economic activity and then like 300,000, you know, jobs associated with the production of that. So that's, you know, everything from boosting, jobs on farms to handling the material to installers, all of that kind of stuff.
00:36:53:24 - 00:37:16:27
Chris Magwood: So that economic analysis, I think, you know, points to the fact that this isn't just like a nice thing to do or good for the climate, but not good for anything else. There's some really sound kind of, economic, incentives to, to think about all of that, undervalue biomass as a really valuable resource for manufacturing.
00:37:16:29 - 00:37:37:07
Chris Magwood: We are also keen, you know, we looked at, at how much carbon you could store in buildings. We know that today there's actually very little carbon storage happening in, in new home construction. So we kind of did here at RMI, we love the S-curve, the s adoption curve showing like, you know, this is hardly happening at all today.
00:37:37:07 - 00:38:00:17
Chris Magwood: But, you know, you help encourage it and then suddenly, you know, sort of take off. And that's the S curve is based on, you know, adoption rates for things like, solar panels, electric vehicles where, you know, they go through, a fairly lengthy, you know, a couple of decades of, of, of gathering momentum. And then they suddenly hit a tipping point where, you know, people call it the hockey stick curve, where suddenly, adoption goes way up.
00:38:00:17 - 00:38:23:26
Chris Magwood: So we sort of applied, a fairly, you know, a not overly optimistic, s curve to this and found that if only 25% of the buildings reached, you know, the quantity of, of, biomass storage that, that we modeled in this study, that, that would that would be the equivalent of 100 million tons of carbon stored by 2050.
00:38:23:26 - 00:38:52:16
Chris Magwood: And so you can again sort of see, like, you know, the S curve predicts that hardly anything happens, over the next ten years. But then, you know, adoption does start to grow. If we can either speed up the adoption rate, so that it starts happening earlier or that that the percentage of people adopting, these, you know, these numbers could get even better by 100 million tons of carbon stored by 2050 would be the single biggest Cd-R.
00:38:52:18 - 00:39:20:14
Chris Magwood: You know, effort, in the on the planet by far. And so, you know, I think I think again, just points to the huge opportunity that we have in this industry to, really lead on, on making, big changes for the climate. So quick summary. You know, thinking that we could store 100 million tons of CO2 over the next 25 years, create $79 billion of manufacturing opportunities.
00:39:20:16 - 00:39:47:01
Chris Magwood: And, you know, make a dent in the 400 million tons of, underused biomass that's currently, you know, generated on farms, forests and from, waste streams going to landfill. So that's that's kind of our our pitch to the industry. Like, we could achieve all of this if we, you know, thought really seriously about and strategized towards, upcycling this biomass into, into buildings.
00:39:47:04 - 00:40:09:03
Chris Magwood: For one of our teams here at RMI, we also applied the same kind of analysis to, a global building scale. And we released that as a paper on the website. You can go check it out. The harnessing carbon removal opportunities in biomass residue building products. This was an attempt to do the same kind of analysis, but for the global building stock.
00:40:09:06 - 00:40:29:25
Chris Magwood: And, you know, we found you could store 100 million tons in new homes by 2050, but we could be storing a 1.2 gigatons, globally. And, when you start converting it to, to that kind of scale like that, you know, that then you know, would be the single biggest thing that humans have probably ever done for the climate.
00:40:29:28 - 00:40:57:25
Chris Magwood: And, and again, you know, this was limited to products that, you know, have ebbed. And so it's probably representing, a very conservative, amount that, compared to what we, we likely could be storing. So we're getting close to the end here. Thanks for listening. Before I get into questions, I know one of the questions that always comes up is, you know, does does this short term carbon storage matter, to the climate?
00:40:57:25 - 00:41:16:28
Chris Magwood: Because especially from people who are used to sort of, typical life cycle assessment in LCA, we tend to say that that these this carbon storage ends up, being carbon neutral because, you know, you know, you put a ton of carbon into something, but at the end of its life, it comes out. So they call it the minus one.
00:41:16:28 - 00:41:35:04
Chris Magwood: So minus you took, a ton of carbon heavy atmosphere, but at the end of life, LCA just assumes that full amount of carbon goes back to the atmosphere. And so, you know, minus one plus one equals zero. So we tend to think in in LCA terms of these things as being carbon neutral sometimes, but not having climate benefit.
00:41:35:04 - 00:41:58:20
Chris Magwood: And that's a great way to count carbon. The way that that lifecycle assessment does it, it sort of breaks it down by, by product, like the lifecycle phase shows you where the carbon comes in, where it comes out, where emissions happen. That's really great. But what it doesn't tell us is how how does it affect the climate to, to have that carbon stored.
00:41:58:23 - 00:42:26:00
Chris Magwood: And so, I sort of, you know, the analogy I like to use for this is the way lifecycle assessment does it. It's like a ledger for your bank account. It's like, I put a dollar in, you know, I took a dollar out. I have $0, but the way dynamic lifecycle assessment looks at that is it says, well, I put a dollar into the account and it was in there for 20 years at x percent.
00:42:26:03 - 00:42:56:26
Chris Magwood: So when I take a dollar out at the end, I still have more than a dollar. You know, there's that there's a, a a benefit there. It's not just a dollar in a dollar out. And it's the analogy isn't, particularly strong one for, for that, for the climate. But it does, you know, essentially the climate charges interest when you put the emissions into the atmosphere because they don't just go in and disappear, they go into the atmosphere and actually continue to drive warming for centuries.
00:42:56:29 - 00:43:20:03
Chris Magwood: And, you know, when you take carbon out, even if it is just for 50 years, there's also a sort of interest in in reduced warming over those 50 years. That dynamic LCA gives you a glimpse into. And I mention that because these two camps, are often seen as being opposed to each other. Like, this one is right, and this one is wrong or vice versa.
00:43:20:05 - 00:43:38:12
Chris Magwood: And really, it's like, no, we need to count the carbon when it goes in and when it comes out and be clear on that. So we need that kind of accounting. But then we also should be looking at how does the climate respond to that. So it's it's it's sort of two different insights that you gain from these two different lenses.
00:43:38:15 - 00:43:52:14
Chris Magwood: But it's that dynamic LCA that the the valuing of the climate impact of stored carbon, where we actually see, well, this this actually means something for the climate. It's not just a, a wash.
00:43:52:17 - 00:44:17:08
Chris Magwood: And graphically, I've found this very hard to, to, demonstrate or sort of make clear, my colleague Tracy sort of has helped me with this. I'm not sure we've developed the best way to, to talk about it, but, you know, if we look at a ton of emissions, so it could be from a building product, could be from a ton of biomass that that, you know, burns off in a field or rocks off in a field.
00:44:17:10 - 00:44:42:12
Chris Magwood: You know, when that CO2 goes into the atmosphere, you know, the global temperature, you know, it drives warmer climate for, you know, we cut this graph off at 100 years, but, you know, it gradually decreases over centuries. But but you know, every tonne we put in warms the planet this year and continues to warm the planet next year and continues to warm and next year.
00:44:42:16 - 00:45:03:09
Chris Magwood: And because the planet's already warm, you know, the more you trap, the warmer it gets. So it sort of has that, that cumulative effect. So, you know, for the first 25 years after you make the emission, the planet just keeps getting warmer because of your emission. When we remove it's almost the, the, the exact opposite of that.
00:45:03:09 - 00:45:28:15
Chris Magwood: So, you know, for the next 25 ish years, the planet gets cooler. I mean, it doesn't really, because if globally, we're still putting more emissions in the atmosphere then than we're removing, but it you know, it it has the effect of tempering, by, by the same amount. And then the question of, well, you know, what about when you let that carbon go at the end of its life, to which, you know, there's more than one answer.
00:45:28:15 - 00:45:43:21
Chris Magwood: We don't have to let it go at end of life. It doesn't have to be a 100% emission. If we can recycle that, if we can turn it into biochar, maybe if we bury an early deep hole, you know, there are all kinds of ways to make sure biogenic carbon doesn't readmit at the end of its life, but say it does.
00:45:43:21 - 00:46:08:21
Chris Magwood: It gets to six years. You readmit it, you know, it goes back into the atmosphere. And that essentially, you know, this curve here is the same as this curve. But because you've cooled the atmosphere or you, you know, you've helped temper the atmosphere for those 60 years, the the impact of rereleasing that carbon is a fraction of what it would be if it was just emitted.
00:46:08:24 - 00:46:30:04
Chris Magwood: There's a whole bunch of climate science, behind this that I'm, you know, I'm not explaining. But there are some great dynamic LCA tools and that's sort of what you can use to, to be able to map this kind of, this kind of, scenario out with. And obviously the scenario changes if it's a product that gets thrown out from the building in ten years, this looks really different.
00:46:30:10 - 00:47:06:19
Chris Magwood: If it stays in the building for 150 years, it looks really different. So that the, you know, the length of time, really matters. But no matter the length of time, there is, a climate, a positive climate impact that isn't undone by the release of that carbon. And again, lots to talk about there. If, if people want to go into it, I am going to wrap up with, just a couple minutes of giving you a glimpse at some, actual projects that, you know, are doing this now and have been doing this again, just to give you a sense that this isn't like a well, that's really nice in science fiction land,
00:47:06:19 - 00:47:27:05
Chris Magwood: 20 years from now, we could be building buildings this way. You know, I just wanted to show you a handful where, where this, you know, is already happening. The first one here is, is, one of the projects that I was involved in as a builder. We did, penalized, construction. So floor, walls and roof made of panels.
00:47:27:08 - 00:47:46:26
Chris Magwood: The panels had a bunch of different carbon storing, installations in them, including, straw and straw bill, cellulose. We had some cork panels. We had wood fiberboard. This was kind of a smorgasbord of all the things that, that you could make carbon storing. We even had a couple of them with mycelium insulation on them.
00:47:46:28 - 00:48:05:22
Chris Magwood: But in addition to the carbon storage, what we really wanted to do with this project was completely design the project for disassembly as a way of showing, hey, there's a way that this carbon doesn't have to go back to the atmosphere at the end of that product's life. And so we actually built this building at our home base here in Peterborough, Ontario.
00:48:05:24 - 00:48:44:06
Chris Magwood: We completely disassembled it, put it up again at a design show in Toronto, did not have to waste or reuse or replace a single material and then we took it down again and put it up on a client site again without having to waste or reuse, or rebuy any materials. And so, you know, to me, that's, an important step in if we want to take carbon storage in buildings really seriously, we put a lot of carbon storing products in, and we make sure that those products are removable and reusable to the greatest degree possible so that, you know, the longer we can extend the period of time that that carbon stays out of
00:48:44:06 - 00:49:12:24
Chris Magwood: the atmosphere, the better we're doing for the climate. So design for disassembly, whether it's just finishes or the entire building, is a great way to do that. I love this project. From Footprint Development in, in Minneapolis. It's a 23 unit passive house building. You know, they use some, some really conventional products like, cellulose insulation and, engineered wood siding.
00:49:12:26 - 00:49:31:14
Chris Magwood: One of the carpet products from interface that has, a lot of bio based material in it, you know, very straightforward, very cost effective. And also combined with great energy efficiency, to, you know, show that you could put a lot of carbon in a building that you can bring the carbon footprint down, substantially.
00:49:31:16 - 00:49:58:13
Chris Magwood: And, you know, they noted just a 1.7%, budget increase for, for having done that. So, you know, a very small investment to get a huge return, another, one multifamily, this one on a smaller scale, just a duplex. Same kind of notion, you know, lots of carbon storing, products in it. Lots of attempts to make sure that, the emissions from the rest of the products are kept low.
00:49:58:20 - 00:50:27:21
Chris Magwood: And, and again, both are really, low net carbon footprint and, and a whole bunch of, long term storage in that building. And in case, you know, you're thinking, well, that's great single family homes, that doesn't solve the problem. I've got some larger buildings that, that, that are doing the same thing. So this is, the the world's tallest, straw bale, high rise, 12 story, 65 apartments, 146 tons of storage just in the straw.
00:50:27:23 - 00:50:47:11
Chris Magwood: Panel insulation. That's by the company Eco Cocoon. Lots of great things about this building. I would suggest to you go look it up. It's, they just finished putting the roof on it, and, you know, it'll be opening and you'll probably be, hearing more about this one soon. An older one. And sorry about that photo quality there.
00:50:47:11 - 00:51:11:12
Chris Magwood: When I converted this to PDF, some of these things got a bit fuzzy. But the the the jewel fairy residence in France, that was a prefab. Straubel. Apartment building. That's actually, I think it's at least ten years old now. If not more. Again, a couple hundred tons of storage in the, in the straw panels that went into constructing that one.
00:51:11:15 - 00:51:39:03
Chris Magwood: This one in Cape Town, South Africa, is the world's largest and I'm guessing probably, only, hempcrete, apartment tower. But again, you know, a great example of a multi-story building using, a whole lot of carbon storing, materials. And in case you think this is just for new construction, this is not a residential project, but this is a retrofit of a sports hall in the Netherlands.
00:51:39:06 - 00:52:04:25
Chris Magwood: Where they wrapped, an old concrete block building with panels filled with, dense, packed chopped straw and, and, you know, again, upped the energy efficiency of the building and, and stored a whole lot of carbon. This I'm going to end on this is, a quote from a report that came up from the United Nations Environment Program, a couple of years ago now.
00:52:05:02 - 00:52:32:11
Chris Magwood: And when this finally when this came out and I read it, I was just, you know, felt like, validation for, you know, years of talking about the potential for carbon storage in buildings. But, you know, this this report is, you know, kind of pointing to the, the exact same kinds of things that, that we've been finding in our studies that this is, you know, one of the, the, the leading ways to really address, you know, that overall embodied carbon, from buildings.
00:52:32:11 - 00:53:16:21
Chris Magwood: But also to provide this, this huge reservoir of carbon storage that we, we really need for the climate. So emit less stormwater. It's a simple message, probably not so simple in its execution. But I'm glad, you all sort of stuck around for the, to hear about it, and, and hopefully, you know, gives you, at least a little push, towards doing your part to, if you make less and storm more and I'll just wrap up with, a few resources that if you, if you want to explore this further, you can check out any of these resources are a good, good way to, dive, dive
00:53:16:21 - 00:53:25:21
Chris Magwood: a little bit deeper. And so, with that, I'm, happy to, take questions.
00:53:25:24 - 00:53:49:00
Mike Collignon: All right. Thank you. Chris. Yes, definitely. If people have questions, please send them in. We certainly have some that we can get to now. We're going to start with, Clement, an interesting question and try and get you through this one here. He's wanting to know if there's any agency that has, like, a resilience versus maximum carbon storage calculator.
00:53:49:00 - 00:54:21:02
Mike Collignon: So think of it like cost benefit analysis, but in a different way. With the main consideration being the average carbon cost involved in, let's say, rebuilding a lesser resilience structure. That's been destroyed in a natural event where, let's say, a more resilient structure would have survived. But the carbon storage would have been less on the more resilient structure, like, how do you does anybody have anything that helps with that?
00:54:21:05 - 00:54:43:02
Chris Magwood: I there is no sort of magic tool that that helps with that. But I think the two things aren't as diametrically opposed as as people might think. You know, it's not like, you know, there there's this example which is highly carbon storing but buoyant melts the second a raindrop hits it. And then there's, you know, this concrete bunker that lasts or anything.
00:54:43:02 - 00:55:08:14
Chris Magwood: But boy, does it have a big carbon footprint like, yes, those are two extremes, but neither of them really hold up. Right? Like, you could make that concrete bunker out of the lowest carbon concrete and, you know, be be inventive with the concrete mix and, you know, put a bunch of biochar aggregate in there and get that concrete very close to, you know, being neutral on its emissions.
00:55:08:14 - 00:55:34:17
Chris Magwood: Like, we're not that far away from being able to do that. And on the other side, like the the people assume that these biomaterials, like, literally do either melt at the first drop of water or like, combust, you know, as soon as the thermometer gets a little warm outside and, you know, 30 years of, you know, straw bale and hemp construction in, in North America and around the world has proven that to be like, absolutely not true.
00:55:34:18 - 00:56:04:11
Chris Magwood: You know, the fire performance of some of these materials is actually better. All kinds of examples from, wildfires in California, where the straw bale house is the only thing left standing. Everything else burned down, like there's literally dozens of those examples. You know, built properly. And I'm not going to go into the building science of it, but vapor permeable, wall systems made out of natural materials are incredibly resilient in the face of moisture.
00:56:04:13 - 00:56:37:27
Chris Magwood: When it's really humid out, there's 8 pounds of, vapor storage per cubic foot of a straw insulated wall that, you know, it's like that. That's astounding that you can put that much water vapor into that smaller space, and none of it turns into liquid water and starts to cause mold or rot. Also, a vapor permeable, you know, system like that has a huge potential to dry out versus, you know, materials that are, you know, have plastic on either side or in some ways aren't vapor permeable.
00:56:38:00 - 00:57:01:05
Chris Magwood: So, you know, and if you're if your issue is flooding, it doesn't really matter what you build out of. You could have all foam, all mineral based insulation. If the building goes four feet underwater, all of that's getting ripped out like the wood framing is rotting, the floor is rot, like the drywall is all gone. Like it's it's not like our conventional buildings are really resilient.
00:57:01:05 - 00:57:19:06
Chris Magwood: And these other products aren't that they're actually very comparable in resilience. And so it's more about design, like if you live in a flood area, don't build in the floodplain and get the building, you know, up off the ground, then you could build with just about anything you want and be resilient. So I think it's, you know, and maybe making light of it.
00:57:19:09 - 00:57:45:27
Chris Magwood: There is a case for like, you know what things last long and definitely things that last long, you know, mitigate some of their upfront carbon footprint. But if you if you cast your mind back to that graph, I showed the concrete bunker like it, like, sure, if it lasts 300 years, but it doesn't matter. Like it started making the planet really hot the day it was made, and it keeps making the planet hot for its entire lifespan.
00:57:45:27 - 00:58:13:19
Chris Magwood: Okay, you know, you actually could rebuild a carbon storing building dozens of times. Not that you want. It's dumb thing to do for cost, but, you know, for the climate impact, you could rebuild the carbon starting building 20 times and it won't have the climate impact of building, you know, a really high carbon footprint building once. So it's it's not as simple, but it's also not as opposed as people think, like there are absolutely ways to make sure the roof stays on.
00:58:13:19 - 00:58:24:11
Chris Magwood: You avoid floods. You're not a fire hazard with carbon storing materials. It's just as easy to do as with not carbon storing materials.
00:58:24:13 - 00:58:53:09
Mike Collignon: Okay, so, we'll kind of bounce around in different people's questions, but we're going to try and get to all of them if we can here. Chris. Had one question come in from Joseph in regards to, sourcing. So how important is the source of the bio materials in determining some of these values? Do they have to be diverted from feedstocks that would have maybe ended up decomposing rapidly?
00:58:53:12 - 00:59:18:06
Chris Magwood: Yeah. I mean, that's those are the ones we concentrated on in the study. That's why I kept using the term undervalued biomass. So by and large we're looking at things where, where that the part of the, of the plant that's going into the building is a byproduct of some other thing, mostly food production. So, you know, I talked a lot about straw strong shows up a lot in the report.
00:59:18:08 - 00:59:38:28
Chris Magwood: It's, you know, one of the products that has the most uses and the most sort of manufactured options available now, but that comes from growing grain. So why do we have so much of it? Because we grow a lot of grain. We grow a plant that's, you know, 16 20in tall. We take the seed, head off the top of it and we eat that.
00:59:39:00 - 00:59:58:04
Chris Magwood: And then there's a stock left over. So, you know, that's where I think, you know, the real biomass wins are, is is in this, this, you know, 400 million tons. We identified of various types of biomass. It can be shells from nuts. It could be husks from rice. It could be straw. You know, there's there are lots and lots of examples.
00:59:58:08 - 01:00:21:11
Chris Magwood: But that stuff was being made already. And the part that we're saying you should turn it into a building material. Yes. It was going to either be burned off or rot off or, you know, in some way go back to the atmosphere really quickly. So that's, you know, that's the advantage. And I know, like, I did not really address virgin timber products in this study at all.
01:00:21:13 - 01:00:44:09
Chris Magwood: And, you know, there obviously are a lot of carbon atoms in, in that in, you know, in timber that you put into buildings. I, you know, that the, the complexities around understanding whether that has climate benefits and how big or how small those climate benefits are. You know, there's a part in the report where we sort of said we're going to sidestep that issue and not really talk about it.
01:00:44:09 - 01:01:06:29
Chris Magwood: You know, it may be that they're storing a lot. It may be that they're storing nothing. That's really complicated. But this other biomass is actually really straightforward because that that the counterfactual is it was going to go back to the atmosphere. So if we can, you know, take that and put it in a building that's, you know, there's such a, a clear climate benefit to that.
01:01:07:02 - 01:01:34:21
Chris Magwood: And I guess maybe to just go a little further on that question. I think the best case scenario of, you know, a building industry that starts to redirect in this way is that we are using regionally available biomass, you know, like if you if you're in California, where they grow a lot of rice, don't import wheat straw from the east side of the country, you know, use the rice straw that's on the west side of the country or, you know, whatever the biomass happens to be.
01:01:34:23 - 01:01:59:13
Chris Magwood: Different parts of the country are rich in different types of biomass. And, you know, people do get worried a lot about transportation emissions. They typically don't undo all the carbon storage. They just sort of knock, some percentage off it. But I think, you know, just practically speaking, you know, let's not import this stuff from Europe. Let's not get dura straw panels from Australia.
01:01:59:15 - 01:02:22:27
Chris Magwood: Let's take, you know, straw from just down the road and turn it into those same kind of panels. You know, the benefits are better for the climate. They're also better for your local economy. They're also better for resilience to your supply chain. You know, there's lots of reasons to to try to be more regional. And I think that was maybe part of that question as well.
01:02:22:29 - 01:02:47:24
Mike Collignon: All right. We have more wonderful questions coming in, Chris. So I'm excited to get to these because, there's some really good ones in here. Let's go. Let's go to Megan's question. So she's asking about the, 36 metric ton carbon intensity per home figure. Is that based on the entire life cycle of the home, including maintenance, or is it just from the up front impacts?
01:02:47:26 - 01:03:18:01
Chris Magwood: That's just in LCA nerd terms, A1 to A3, just the product phase emissions. So that number would get bigger for the home if you added maintenance, replacement, end of life. You know, you'd expect that to grow. And then where you draw the end of life of a building, that's always the thing with LCA. But yeah, it's so we're just looking at that, at that up front part largely because, well, for two reasons.
01:03:18:03 - 01:03:41:11
Chris Magwood: It's a big part. And again, now emissions matter a lot to to what happens with our climate. But also those are the ones that are measurable and verifiable in the same way, like the rules around making EVs kind of they're in pretty close alignment on A1 to A3. Everything else gets a bit speculative and everybody does it slightly differently.
01:03:41:11 - 01:04:09:12
Chris Magwood: So it's hard to know, you know, how far did something travel, how many emissions happened during installation? I'm noticing the comment from Peter in The Thing like end of life is a big issue. Like, you know, incineration is really different than landfill. Open landfills are really different than deep landfills, landfills with methane, you know, reclamation are different. So what what those emissions look like, it's you make a lot of assumptions, there.
01:04:09:15 - 01:04:16:04
Chris Magwood: But we don't have to, you know, there's a lot less assumption and more measurability to those upfront emissions.
01:04:16:06 - 01:04:37:23
Mike Collignon: Okay. Let's go to, one from Andy. Why don't we see some of these materials more commonly available? Is it is it like a scalability issue? That would satisfy the incredible need for more housing?
01:04:37:25 - 01:05:01:16
Chris Magwood: I think, you know, until until people start really paying attention in the climate, you know, I made a lot of things like these things perform just as well as conventional materials. They cost about the same as conventional materials. That's not a compelling reason to to, like, start a whole new factory. Right? Like until until the climate benefit is added to it.
01:05:01:23 - 01:05:21:03
Chris Magwood: Like, why would a builder try something new? So I'm going to try something new. It cost the same. It performs at same like what? What am I getting out of it? If I'm the manufacturer? If it costs the same, it performs the same. What am I getting it out of it? I think, you know, there's two things that make them worth looking at.
01:05:21:03 - 01:05:47:00
Chris Magwood: One is the climate impact. And that's huge. And that's what we're trying to demonstrate here. And the other is quite often not all the time, but often these materials, have either no or very little kind of questionable chemical content in them. And so, you know, if you're looking to make a healthy building with a low carbon footprint at the same cost, and the same performance, then there's a really solid case for these.
01:05:47:00 - 01:06:10:21
Chris Magwood: But if you're just wanting to make a building the cost the same and performs the same, you know there's not much compelling people to try different things or, you know, get into making different products. And I think that's why in the last five years we've seen, you know, this space go from having zero manufacturers in North America to, you know, 10 or 12.
01:06:10:23 - 01:06:23:17
Chris Magwood: It's not enough to to get us where we're going. But, but, but the fact that there is this climate benefit is starting to matter. And and that's the kind of tipping, tipping point, I think.
01:06:23:20 - 01:06:48:18
Mike Collignon: In our friend Eric brings up the good point to about how, you know, this reason alone may not necessarily push builders to go with this, but to take this into context with other benefits, such as improve resilience or lower cost materials, maybe supply chain risk reduction. You know, it's you got to look at it as is more than just in this one singular benefit.
01:06:48:18 - 01:07:13:16
Chris Magwood: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, obviously everything we've put into this report that the common factor is the climate piece, like these are all better for the climate individually. Some are way better options for, you know, indoor air quality or you know, health or lack of chemicals, but some aren't and some are more resilient and some, you know, like then it gets into what are your criteria.
01:07:13:16 - 01:07:36:11
Chris Magwood: And you know, which specific of these biomass materials might, might meet all of your criteria. It's probably not going to be all of them all the time. You know, for all uses. But but you know, where you can stack those benefits. You want to choose the one that's giving you two or 3 or 4 things you're looking for, and not just the climate piece.
01:07:36:14 - 01:07:55:21
Mike Collignon: So here's, kind of a specific question from Trey, in regards to graphene concrete, and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Do you have any thoughts on that process? Process versus something like, biochar, and their respective carbon footprints.
01:07:55:23 - 01:08:20:04
Chris Magwood: I'm going to wade into some slightly uncertain territory here. I know, you know, I've seen the EPA for three different biochar concrete additives and they are all showing like very carbon negative carbon storing that any EPD that I've seen for graphene, the carbon footprint is quite high. So it is it is carbon. And then you are putting it in the thing.
01:08:20:06 - 01:08:46:12
Chris Magwood: So you're essentially storing carbon. But but it actually there's more emissions went into the atmosphere to make that graphene than the carbon it's storing. So you know if you're doing the plus minus scale like the the plus emissions are higher than, than the minus storage, I don't know that that will always be the case. I'm sure there are people working on bringing that down, but everything that I to date that I've seen on graphene, it hasn't tipped that balance.
01:08:46:12 - 01:09:08:27
Chris Magwood: I mean, the same thing goes people are really interested in CO2 injected concrete right now. The CO2 that's being injected into concrete is sort of manufactured CO2, and the emissions it takes to make that CO2 bottle it and get it, you know, into the concrete, are higher than the than the the amount of carbon that actually gets stored in the concrete.
01:09:08:27 - 01:09:26:26
Chris Magwood: So like both of them, let's be like ideas that are going in the right direction, like putting carbon in buildings. But but right now they're processes are such that it's not it doesn't pan out to be like, a climate benefit.
01:09:26:29 - 01:09:52:26
Mike Collignon: So let's go back to Joseph because he had a couple other questions to, do the assumptions about land use changes and assumptions about, say, future forestry management practices, do they come into play when you're determining stored carbon values? And he throws out the example of, is there an assumption that the forest has to be responsibly managed for 100 years?
01:09:53:28 - 01:10:27:17
Chris Magwood: So can we talk a little bit about the. So again, I'll say we didn't touch forestry products at all in this report. Right. Because those are big questions. And and quite frankly, the answers are different in, in different types of forests, in different places. The pressures on forests are different. You know, one of the things we did look at, as a feedstock is that the things that are coming out of certain forests because Forest Service is going in and taking out small trees to reduce the likelihood of wildfires.
01:10:27:19 - 01:10:59:21
Chris Magwood: So in that case, that that fiber sort of matches the same criteria as, you know, the straw or the hemp or whatever, like they're pulling all this stuff out of the forest and there's nothing to do with it. Sometimes it is being burned off, sometimes it's being rotted, but like it is becoming an emission. So but I think, you know, the forestry question, it's it's super complex and the answers are going to be different regionally and by practice and by species and by how long you leave it in rotation.
01:10:59:21 - 01:11:28:26
Chris Magwood: Like, it, it, you know, and I'm not you know, I hope nobody leaves saying, oh, that Chris Nate guy says, you know, wood products aren't any good. I'm not saying that at all. I mean, they do have a very low carbon footprint upfront. And and they may very well have a climate benefit. I have not either done or seen an analysis, broad analysis or specific analysis that I feel like, oh, that's answered all my questions about, you know, the climate impact of this.
01:11:28:26 - 01:11:50:02
Chris Magwood: So I think just, you know, so we just sidestep that in this, in this thing and did focus on things, you know, where there probably there has been land use change all our farmland that's making that wheat and that corn right now a lot of it used to be forest. It got cut down, but it didn't get cut down this year for that or very little of it did.
01:11:50:02 - 01:12:10:05
Chris Magwood: So, you know, we're trying to focus on on the biomass where we are already doing the thing like we're growing the corn, we're growing the wheat, we're going to soy, we're going there, whatever. We're growing. And there's a whole whack of biomass left over when we do that. That's, I think, where the, the sort of the key opportunity is.
01:12:10:08 - 01:12:26:11
Mike Collignon: Well, I don't know if this is a follow on question to that or not, but Peter brought it up, you know, is there any work being done to quantify decay rates. And I think he was referring more to landfills. But, is there any research being done there.
01:12:26:13 - 01:12:32:11
Chris Magwood: Decay rates in terms of like the, the, the biomass. It's in a building.
01:12:32:13 - 01:12:34:05
Mike Collignon: You know, in landfills, in metals.
01:12:34:12 - 01:12:35:01
Chris Magwood: Yes.
01:12:35:02 - 01:12:36:19
Mike Collignon: There uncapped.
01:12:36:21 - 01:12:56:10
Chris Magwood: Yeah. There's all kinds of it. And that's what makes it confusing. It's like you know, it ranges. And so if you're trying to predict the end of life of this particular product, you know, you have to know literally what landfill it's going to, or at least the region it's going to and the laws that are there and are they going to stay the same.
01:12:56:10 - 01:13:28:23
Chris Magwood: And, you know, there's so much about that. So all kinds of different landfills have been studied and surveyed. There is some there's a there's really good average data for the whole United States, but I don't know, relying on that average means like if I'm putting actually putting it in this kind of landfill, I could be emitting way less than the average says, or it could be emitting way more, you know, and by the time I put it in that landfill, 40, 60, 80 years from now, will that be the expected emissions from that landfill?
01:13:28:25 - 01:13:47:18
Chris Magwood: You know, you get into all kinds of just speculative territory, I think, where it's good to think about that and to and to make educated guesses. But it also like those numbers are they're a bit smoky, you know, like they they could be more than we think, or they could be less than we think.
01:13:47:21 - 01:13:51:03
Mike Collignon: Yeah, it's probably gonna land more in a range than it will on a specific.
01:13:51:09 - 01:13:51:17
Chris Magwood: Yeah.
01:13:51:18 - 01:13:53:21
Mike Collignon: Or trajectory on a graph.
01:13:53:23 - 01:13:55:00
Chris Magwood: Yeah.
01:13:55:02 - 01:14:05:04
Mike Collignon: Well okay. So let's go to a question from Megan. What service life assumption do you typically use for residential buildings in the US?
01:14:05:07 - 01:14:18:18
Chris Magwood: Well, again, for this study we made no, none of those assumptions because we're just looking at the upfront. I mean, that's another one of those questions, you know, that there's sort of that the typical number for a lifecycle assessment is 60 years.
01:14:18:21 - 01:14:19:24
Mike Collignon: Okay.
01:14:19:27 - 01:14:55:16
Chris Magwood: I don't know that that's necessarily defensible. You know, you know, I if I look out either of my windows here, I'm looking at houses that are way older than 60 years old, you know, one of them is 150. And one of them is 100, you know, so is my whole neighborhood. Is 60 a good number? I don't know, sometimes people build a small development and it gets mowed down 15 years later because they're shopping malls going in like, you know, I don't know, I feel like 60 to 100 years probably gives us, like, again, like a reasonable range to think about.
01:14:55:16 - 01:15:03:21
Chris Magwood: And, and, you know, you'll never actually be right, but you'll have made, an educated assumption.
01:15:03:24 - 01:15:21:02
Mike Collignon: Yeah. I think it's probably going to just be more on average. Right. You're you're talking about the age of what you're seeing right there. I'm sitting in a building that's a little over 20 years old. I'll look out my window. Chris and I see a house that's three years old. So it's, you know, you get all sorts of numbers, right?
01:15:21:02 - 01:15:23:06
Mike Collignon: And you kind of break it up into an average.
01:15:23:08 - 01:15:25:01
Chris Magwood: Yeah.
01:15:25:04 - 01:15:41:02
Mike Collignon: Okay, let's go to James's question. He's wanting to know when regards to straw bale buildings. Is it difficult to get either the buildings and or the products approved, you know, locally or nationally? And then there's a follow up to them.
01:15:41:05 - 01:16:06:15
Chris Magwood: Sure. I would say it depends where you are. So that the international residential code, the, you know, the the home building code for the US, adopted a straw bale appendix in 2015. So there's literally code language that supports, you know, up to two story straw male construction. All the prescriptions are there. Only a handful of states have adopted it.
01:16:06:17 - 01:16:39:26
Chris Magwood: And, some states, you can get a permit by referring to it. And, you know, the building department will be reasonable and go, oh, yeah, there's a well supported code document I could use to say yes. Or they could say, no, our state doesn't do that. And they'll say, no. You know, it's a mixed bag. You know, this week or early next week that the state of Minnesota is looking at adopting that, you know, straw bale, appendix into their code, you know, so I think, again, there's no great singular answer.
01:16:39:28 - 01:16:58:06
Chris Magwood: But I would say, you know, my best guess from looking at, a variety of sources that there are like, maybe in the neighborhood of like 8 to 10,000 straw bale homes in the US. So a whole bunch of people got them permitted. They probably all had, you know, their, their own way of, of getting that done.
01:16:58:06 - 01:17:16:27
Chris Magwood: They might have had to hire an engineer. They might have been able to do it by code. They might have had to do an alternative compliance kind of pathway. But, you know, it is doable. In terms of the product question, one of the reasons travel building is, is still really small is because the product is a bale.
01:17:16:27 - 01:17:43:25
Chris Magwood: It comes off a farm, it's not a product. And so, you know, it lacks that, the kind of you standardization and, and you know, commodification that we associate with building products. So, you know, straw male buildings tend to be very one off because you have to go get the bale from a farm, like you're not going to your building, you know, a retailer and, you know, ordering a truckload of building bales.
01:17:43:25 - 01:18:10:09
Chris Magwood: And so that's, you know, that's been a limiting factor when you where you see straw starting to really ramp up in use is in, you know, prefabricated wall panels, compressed straw panels, like things that do turn it into more of a, of a consistent product of the same weight and density and size, you know, that it sort of scale jumps when when you when you start to sort of change it from that raw bale form.
01:18:10:11 - 01:18:17:09
Mike Collignon: Well, that explains why why couldn't find the straw bale section and Lowe's. That's good. And finally it's,
01:18:17:12 - 01:18:19:22
Chris Magwood: Burned down. You know, there's.
01:18:19:25 - 01:18:41:14
Mike Collignon: Well but but to to that last point, they're not about the Lowe's but about the, about the consistency. Right. The standardization. Do you think it would be easier to potentially get those types of products approved if it came from a manufacturer like you were showing at the eco in versus? Exactly. You I got to go to the local farm.
01:18:41:19 - 01:19:10:21
Chris Magwood: Yeah, that and that's why that's why, you know, in our study we said we're only dealing with products that we can see, factory scale manufacturing happening and it has an EPD because then it is a more standardized product, you know, and it may not be a mega factory. But it's like somebody has figured out how to turn out a product with, you know, consistent qualities and properties versus, yeah, having to go to the farm.
01:19:10:21 - 01:19:31:20
Chris Magwood: And I think, you know, that's that's an important, you know, way that that these things are going to scale generally they have to be something that, you know, you get the same thing every time you order it. And you're not having to do this sort of craft thing of looking at some bales and deciding, are these good ones or not good ones?
01:19:31:23 - 01:19:36:10
Chris Magwood: That works for some people, but it'll stay small if it, if it stays like that.
01:19:36:13 - 01:19:59:12
Mike Collignon: Right. Okay, so I got three questions left then. Chris. We're going to go to one from Robert here. He's talking about existing buildings. And he's wanting to know if they're stored. Carbon can be factored into the lifetime carbon budget when considering whether to demolish the building or to simply make alterations.
01:19:59:14 - 01:20:18:10
Chris Magwood: Absolutely. Yeah. That's that's a great use of sort of whole lifecycle accounting, which is not what I've done here. I've done upfront. But yeah, for sure, you can, you can look and say, you know, first of all, that existing building, whether it was built ten years ago or 100 years ago like that carbon is in the atmosphere.
01:20:18:10 - 01:20:54:26
Chris Magwood: And, you know, that's a done deal. So typically you sort of start with a with a zero for for that building like because as of today when I'm doing this assessment, that building isn't emitting that carbon. Now that happened. So you can sort of say, well, if I make these changes, if I have to add, you know, these materials, if I have to throw these ones away, you know, you can sort of add up the impacts of doing the retrofit, or you can add up the impact of taking away the building and starting from scratch and extend that out over whatever, you know, number of years you want to, to look at it for.
01:20:55:03 - 01:21:02:14
Chris Magwood: It's a great use of the whole building lifecycle assessment is to sort of make those kinds of decisions.
01:21:02:16 - 01:21:27:13
Mike Collignon: All right. So one, going back to Peter for a second here, he he comments that, you know, a lot of buildings are torn down because they no longer meet the owner's needs instead of they're not structurally sound. Yeah. So have you ever and maybe not in the study, but have you ever looked at the reusability of some of the insulation products?
01:21:27:16 - 01:21:57:24
Chris Magwood: Not specifically. I mean, quite often insulation isn't removed like the kinds of things people take down and throw away our, like, exterior. Exciting. I don't like what my vinyl siding looks like anymore. I'm going to change to, steel or, you know, aluminum or whatever. Or I don't like this floor anymore or, you know, whatever, you know, the that that sort of finishes tend to be the things that that, that get treated like that.
01:21:57:27 - 01:22:21:19
Chris Magwood: You know, not very many people are like, I'm not satisfied with my insulation. Like, I'm going to take it out and put, you know, a new kind of insulation in people might add insulation or, you know, in an attic, top it up. But, you know, there I, I can't think in my experience of very many cases where insulation was being removed and therefore, like, we wanted to reuse it.
01:22:21:21 - 01:22:45:07
Chris Magwood: It's one of the things you tend to leave in a building. And I know that that's not always going to be the case. There's, you know, there's going to be exceptions to that. But by and large, it's, you know, but, you know, I think I put my zero House project in there because I think design for disassembly and reusability is like, it's a 100% key, like it's, you know, and we proved it.
01:22:45:07 - 01:23:14:13
Chris Magwood: We're a little tiny building company, $0 R&D budget zero. You know any additional costs? We made a building work. Every single material can be taken off and put on multiple times and nothing gets wasted. So there in that building, if somebody is like, I don't like this plywood interior finish that you put in my building anymore, you can take every one of those pieces of plywood off and sell them to somebody, or reuse them for something else, and all they've got is a couple of screw holes in them.
01:23:14:16 - 01:23:34:17
Chris Magwood: Like, I think that's where we need to get to. And if you can design even with some non carbon storing materials, that's great. Like, you know I always sort of say if we built cars the way we build houses, you would smash the hood off your car every time you wanted to change the oil. That's what we do.
01:23:34:18 - 01:23:58:02
Chris Magwood: Like we put drywall on our buildings or like we put stuff on our buildings. And if you need to fix anything, you need to change some wiring, add a thing, move the thing. Your option is smash that into pieces and put a new thing in its place. Like that just seems ridiculous. You know, show me where the fasteners are and show me how I can take that thing on and off.
01:23:58:02 - 01:24:15:13
Chris Magwood: And, you know, you've just made the biggest improvement to the to the life cycle carbon of a building you'll ever make, if you can, if you can actually remove all the materials and, and reuse them. That's like that's amazing. And it's not that hard to do.
01:24:15:15 - 01:24:19:19
Mike Collignon: So are you proposing hinge to drywall? Is that what.
01:24:19:21 - 01:24:20:07
Chris Magwood: Why not?
01:24:20:11 - 01:24:22:10
Mike Collignon: That's where you go through these drywall.
01:24:22:10 - 01:24:45:16
Chris Magwood: Like why not like, why isn't there just a nice fastener, you know, pattern on my wall with really attractive fasteners? Like, why can't I take that sheet of drywall off, do whatever needs happening and put it back on, or decide? Actually, I'd rather have plywood than drywall. I'm gonna take this drywall off and my neighbor is going to buy it and put it in their place, and I'm going to get the flat like, you know, it's all around.
01:24:45:16 - 01:25:04:20
Chris Magwood: I think there's there's it's not that hard for us to think about, like, you know, so many other industries do it. You make something with the understanding that somebody's going to have to service this thing at some point. I mean, cars have a few pipes open. They have body panels that you can take off and put back on.
01:25:04:22 - 01:25:19:22
Chris Magwood: You know, the analogy for the house is, oh, I need to fix this part of my siding. Well, smash it all off the building, you know, go get new stuff. It's, you know, it's a bit, it's a bit, you know, it's very old school, and we could be doing a lot better.
01:25:19:25 - 01:25:46:11
Mike Collignon: All right, final question here, came from Megan. It's very timely. And you're going to have to tread lightly. Do you have any thoughts on whether U.S tariffs might affect the price of carbon storing products if they have to be shipped from the US to Canada or, you know, they're going across borders because she's just curious if that's something that we should keep in mind.
01:25:46:13 - 01:26:10:03
Chris Magwood: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think again, that's in the report, you know, even though I'm Canadian, reminds the US organization, like we very much focused on biomass that's grown right in the US right now. You know, because your bamboo cladding, your cork flooring, whatever for the next, however long probably are going to go up in cost because of tariffs.
01:26:10:05 - 01:26:34:08
Chris Magwood: But regionally supplied biomass made in the factory, you know, in your region. Like unless we get into weird state to state tariffs, things devolved to that point. You know that that is one way to create supply chains that that aren't as, you know, vulnerable to, to, to those kinds of changes.
01:26:34:11 - 01:27:01:06
Mike Collignon: All right. Elizabeth snuck in one last question. So we're going to get to it. She wants to know, how can you how can we US industry promote these practices with indigenous populations in in global South economies? Is there some sort of guidebook? Let's say, or best practice methodology? So that each bio region can begin to identify their own unique climate, positive material pipeline or supply chain?
01:27:01:08 - 01:27:37:13
Chris Magwood: Yes, I would say yes. And I would say like, you know, we don't necessarily need to show indigenous populations that like some of the real leaders in North America, in Africa, in India, those are the places that I'm aware of are are actually the leaders in the space already. And we could take a lesson from them. I would suggest looking at the, the film that was done on the Lower Sioux, tribe and their hempcrete home thing, where they're, like, growing them, processing hemp and making the homes, you know, all all on their own land like that.
01:27:37:16 - 01:27:58:02
Chris Magwood: They're they're doing the thing that I'm saying, hey, we could do this thing in this study. They're already doing it. And, you know, they're not the only example. I think, you know, in, in a lot of ways, you know, that sort of wider building industry would benefit from, from seeing what's already happening in those communities and not being like, hey, we got this thing we can show you.
01:27:58:02 - 01:28:08:26
Chris Magwood: And it's like, well, their knowledge is actually based on those principles. And and they're the ones that are, you know, likely to be able to, to, to teach us a thing or two about it.
01:28:08:28 - 01:28:21:10
Mike Collignon: All right. Well, we got through our questions. Chris, thank you so much for the presentation and for all the responses. Very much appreciated. So.
01:28:21:12 - 01:28:38:21
Chris Magwood: Yeah, thanks to everybody who stuck around and, you know, happy to have longer discussions with folks, you know, on, on any of these pieces. You know, there's a lot to all of this and, hopefully that, that, conversation doesn't just stop here.
01:28:38:24 - 01:29:02:02
Mike Collignon: Yeah, well, maybe we'll have you back on again here soon. Thank you as well. I want to pass on my thanks to the audience for asking all those wonderful questions. And of course, our sponsors as well, carrier, Mohawk and Trex Company for their generous sponsorships of today's webinar. Our next one is going to be with the, housing 2.0 program creator, Sam Raskin.
01:29:02:06 - 01:29:28:20
Mike Collignon: That's right. He returns on Thursday, August 21st to discuss how to manage affordability uncertainty that's especially timely, giving all the tariffs on various materials that is going to get underway at 2:00 pm eastern again Thursday, August 21st. You can register for that right now on the Green Building Media website. Thanks again for joining us today. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy and take care everyone.
01:29:28:20 - 01:29:29:08
Mike Collignon: So long.