Rocky Mountain Institute carbon-free buildings manager Chris Magwood walks through the draft RESNET 1550 standard for measuring and reporting embodied carbon in homes, with benchmark data from roughly 1,000 houses and case studies of projects that cut embodied carbon by about 75%.
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Mike Collignon: And what are we talking about today? Well, we're going to discuss how to measure, manage and minimize embodied carbon in home construction. We'll also dive into the upcoming ResNet standard 1550, which will help construction teams track and report embodied carbon. And finally, we're going to look into which building materials contribute the most, but also how to make smart choices like the ones that are featured in real world case studies of affordable, low carbon homes that we will feature later in the presentation.
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Mike Collignon: Here to walk us through all of that is Chris Maywood, who is the manager of carbon free buildings at Rocky Mountain Institute and director of Home Builders Can. Chris joined RMI Carbon Free Buildings team in 2022. He leads efforts on homebuilders Can, which is a unique community of practice for home builders working to decarbonize and the development of the ResNet Nancy standard 1550 for the measurement and reporting of embodied carbon for homes.
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Mike Collignon: Now, earlier in his career, he helped to establish builders for Climate Action, has been a leading development, has been leading the development of the Beam Carbon Estimator tool for low rise construction. He ran a design build firm specializing in carbon storing, healthy, energy efficient new construction and renovations, and he has had a hand in authoring seven books on sustainable building.
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Mike Collignon: Now, this webinar would not be possible without our friends at NV energy. By now, you probably know all about Power Shift by NV energy. But just in case you don't. It helps residential and business customers conserve energy and save money on their power bills. Power shift is a one stop resource to find energy efficient products and services. For more information, check it out at NV energy.
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Mike Collignon: Shift now. During the course of today's presentation, you can submit questions for Chris. Simply use the Q&A function near the bottom of the zoom window. I'm going to review those questions and pose those to Chris after his presentation. Chris, we are happy to have you make your Green Builder media debut today.
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Chris Magwood: Great. Thanks for thanks for inviting me. And likewise, thanks to everybody who has decided to tune in today. I'm really glad to be presenting about the ResNet 1550 standard. I'm actually going to start with a little bit of a disclaimer on the standard. Everything that I'm presenting to you today is from the draft standard. That draft went out for public comment at the end of last year, and public comment period is closed, and we are now in the process of responding to comments.
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Chris Magwood: So just a little heads up that the things I'm showing you, you know, words may change. You know, things may be a little different, but I think, you know, the standard as a whole, as I'm going to present it today, should be pretty accurate. So thanks for joining us. And I'm going to start just by answering a question that still comes up quite a bit, which is, you know, why should we even care about what this, this embodied carbon thing is all about?
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Chris Magwood: And I'm just going to set that framework a little bit, because that's how I got into this work, was I was, you know, as noted in the intro, ran a design build firm. I really wanted to find out the carbon footprint of all the products that I was putting in, the buildings that I was doing. And so in trying to do that, I learned that it was way bigger than I thought and that it was, you know, a little bit complex to figure it all out.
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Chris Magwood: But for you, some of that context is that over the course of the past bunch of years, I've been involved in studying about 1000 homes and measuring the embodied carbon of those homes. And what we've found is that when you sort of add up all the products we are most typically including here the structure, the enclosure and all the main finishes in the building, but not things like mechanical, electrical and plumbing and no yard work or sort of.
00:04:26:25 - 00:04:56:10
Chris Magwood: Work outside the boundary of the house. But what we found as an average over all of those thousand homes is that there's about 45 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is sort of the the technical term for all greenhouse gases put into the common of CO2, about 45 pounds of CO2 per square foot of construction. That number may or may not mean anything to you.
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Chris Magwood: If we add in the the sort of things that we didn't count there, but that we've been starting to estimate, such as MEP and paint and some other product categories. There's about another 18 pounds per square foot. So, you know, a typical house is going to be somewhere in the range of 63 pounds of carbon dioxide per square foot.
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Chris Magwood: Again, it's just a number to try to put that in context. If we multiply that across all of the low rise new construction that gets built in a year in the US, we come up with about 53 million metric tons of emissions from all of the products that go into making new homes in this country. To give that some context, that 53 million metric tons from just the home building sector in just the United States is equivalent to the carbon footprint of the entire economies of some other countries like Austria, Greece, Hungary, Norway.
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Chris Magwood: So, you know, entire economies where everything they do, every car they drive, every business that gets run, every emission that happens in those countries is about the same size as the emissions from building new homes in the United States. So all of that to say, you know, this is not a small problem. And it's something that that if we are going to try to, you know, regulate the climate and have it not spiral out of control, we're really going to have to tackle this part of home building decarbonization.
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Chris Magwood: And of course, that 53 million metric tons is if we keep building houses at the speed that we have been over the last few years. But as we all know, the sort of the demand for and the need for more housing exists. So if we double that, the emissions are going to double. If we triple it, the emissions are going to triple.
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Chris Magwood: So, you know, if we do start catching up to the sort of latent demand in the housing market, the emissions profile could be even worse than we think.
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Chris Magwood: So at RMI, we we study a lot about s curves and think about the way things get adopted, where it can take quite a long time for an idea to catch on. But as it does, you know, adoption and and implementation of that idea tend to, you know, rise quickly and then plateau when it becomes more normal. And I would say that if I were to plot the, the s curve of embodied carbon right now, I would put us, you know, sort of just on the start of that, that steep upward slope right around the place where we start getting, you know, advanced tools and, and calculation standards.
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Chris Magwood: And it is a calculation standard that I'm here to talk to you about today. So the ResNet 1550 standard, I think, is going to fill this really important gap where we have more demand to want to do this kind of measurement. Now we have the data to do the measurement. But now we need a standard to be able to do it.
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Chris Magwood: So everybody's confident that we're getting comparable answers and we're all kind of doing it the same the same way.
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Chris Magwood: One of the reasons that we really need a standard, especially for embodied carbon, is that there are a lot of variables for embodied carbon. You can you can draw a boundary around the measurement of embodied carbon in a lot of ways. You can look at the different lifecycle stages. So, you know, are you including from the time of raw material comes out of the ground to the very end of its life?
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Chris Magwood: Are you just counting, taking the raw material out of the ground, or turning it into a product, or getting that product to a job site? Each of those is a different sort of boundary box, the project boundary, like I mentioned, you know, you can include different sets of products. You can stay within the walls of the house. You could look at the entire property.
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Chris Magwood: So there's lots of different ways that you could frame a study. And so one of the reasons we need a standard is because we need to pick a box and and make sure that everybody's comfortable that, okay, this is the box we're talking about. And so when I tell you my answer for everything that fits in that box, you know, your answer is is going into the into the same box.
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Chris Magwood: So we we need that that comparability because you can look at a lot of different lifecycle assessments of homes now. And you will see some very different answers. And the reason part of the reason you see those different answers is it depends what the boundaries were put around that particular study.
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Chris Magwood: And so, you know, we need a standard. Why a ResNet standard? I was really interested in working with the ResNet organization because, you know, the Herz rating system touches a lot of homes in the United States that are at about 400,000 new homes a year, are rated through the Herz rating system. So they're there, you know, infrastructure of professionals are already out there.
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Chris Magwood: And they already. They're touching a lot of new homes. In recent years, ResNet has added their Herz H2O, their water standard. They also added the Herz carbon index so that you can use the the energy rating from the Herz index to look at the operational carbon of, of a new building. And so it seemed to make sense that if you could look at the operational carbon through the Herz carbon index, that it would be great to put the embodied carbon right alongside that.
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Chris Magwood: And then you're getting more of a, of a whole life carbon footprint of a building by looking at the results from the Herz carbon index and then from this new embodied carbon standard. And in doing that, you're able to we're able to leverage a lot of the existing modeling work that those Herz writers are already doing. So, you know, in creating the Herz model for a building to look at its energy efficiency, you've already created most of what you need to be able to do, the embodied carbon model.
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Chris Magwood: So instead of having two separate sets of consultants having to input all the same information twice, using this standard Herz rater is going to be able to sort of port most of the work that they've done and have it, you know, contribute to getting an embodied carbon model done pretty quickly and easily.
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Chris Magwood: And so I think it is the ability to put the operational and the embodied carbon of a home together. That really makes situating this standard at ResNet make a lot of sense. This is a graph that we did up based on our own look at embodied carbon at RMI. And then the annual report that ResNet does about the sort of, you know, the average Herz ratings and their emissions using the Herz carbon index.
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Chris Magwood: And basically what this graph is telling us is that this big red bar is the sort of typical embodied carbon 44 tons for for a new American home. And what we wanted to show is that, you know, if we look at all the hers, the homes that got a her score of 55 in the United States, the operating emissions of that building takes a little over five years to equal that up front embodied carbon.
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Chris Magwood: And as you can see, that the better the her score and also the more a building becomes, the more buildings become electrified, the bigger this red bar kind of stands out as, as a leading part of, as the decarbonization problem. So you can see when we get into, you know, quite low Herz scores of 25 or 15, we start getting into 15 to 30 years before the operational emissions have added up to the amount that this upfront embodied carbon was.
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Chris Magwood: And so, you know, we can do lots of work to to reduce on the operational side, but then we really do need to pay attention to, to this piece. So I'm going to show you some snippets from the standard just to give you an overview of how it works. And we'll start with the purpose and scope. And so you'll see I'm not going to read you all of these words, but the purpose is really to a focus on homes and to create consistent system boundaries and to use the data that comes from a Herz rating.
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Chris Magwood: And for scope, we're really focused on residential buildings. So in the sort of like, you know, low rise residential sphere and importantly, the standard unlike the Herz system, we're not getting any benchmark. There is no, you know, baseline building here. We're not saying this is a good embodied carbon score or a bad embodied carbon score. So we're not establishing any benchmarks or levels of performance.
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Chris Magwood: We're just saying here's how to calculate this, in part because this hasn't been done enough to know what you know, what a good benchmark score is. And finally, the standard, you know has to fit within all the other safety, health and environmental requirements that that you would follow to make a building.
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Chris Magwood: So in terms of the lifecycle stages that this standard draws as its boundary, we we are sticking to what's called an A1 to A3 assessment. Those stages are the sort of the making of products. So everything from harvesting raw materials, getting those materials to factories and turning those those raw materials into products ready to go into a building sometimes called the cradle to gate scenario.
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Chris Magwood: That's where we've put our focus. We're sort of aware, you know, obviously, of the rest of these, these stages in the life cycle of a product, but for sort of two main reasons. We're not including them in this standard, at least not in the first version of this standard. One is that most of the emissions do occur in that upfront stage, in that A1 to A3 phase.
00:15:12:14 - 00:15:43:11
Chris Magwood: And also, you know, as we explored, what data were we going to use if we did include these other stages, the data just wasn't very robust or convincing to to sort of feel like we were we were making useful or would be able to make sort of useful assumptions and, and provide useful data to home builders. So we are focused on the A1 to A3 phase and the embodied carbon math.
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Chris Magwood: That's kind of gets used in the standard. It's pretty straightforward. You have to be able to understand how much of a particular material or product you have in the building, and this standard focuses on using area based takeoffs. So not BIM models or bill of materials type modeling, but instead saying, well, I have this much square footage of wall and this much of roof and this much of floor and this much of window, and using those area based models to, to do takeoffs.
00:16:16:03 - 00:16:39:10
Chris Magwood: And that's because those area based models are what hers raters are working from as well. So once they've, you know, assessed a building for all of those important dimensions, they now have all of that dimension information to be able to use for the embodied carbon model. So we've got, you know, how much material and then multiplied by an emissions factor for that particular material or product.
00:16:39:10 - 00:17:01:28
Chris Magwood: And that comes from environmental product declarations, which I'll get into in another slide. But basically for every product that the standard says you need to count, you have to know how much of it you have, what the emissions factor is, and then you'll get a total for the product emissions, and then you'll add those up for all the products that are in the building.
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Chris Magwood: So in the standard there's a there's a very thorough table that provides all of those that take off guidance for how to convert areas into quantities of products. And it also has a sort of data hierarchy, you know, what kinds of are you're able to use? What do you do if there isn't an EPD for your specific product?
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Chris Magwood: All of that is sort of laid out in the in the standard as well.
00:17:32:23 - 00:18:03:23
Chris Magwood: So because we are sort of basing the standard on the use of these environmental product declarations, it's important to know a little bit about them. The reason that they sort of underpin not just this standard, but a lot of embodied carbon standards is because there is an international standard for how that gets done, how an environmental product declaration is both calculated and then reported, don't need to sort of do the deep dive into that.
00:18:03:27 - 00:18:34:21
Chris Magwood: But just so you know, it's sort of all of these these figures are coming from these reports that manufacturers, the manufacturer undertakes the report, but they're always third party verified before we can use them in the standard. And the one piece of information that's key for from an iPad for this standard is the global warming potential. So what you get from an EPD is a for any certain quantity of material.
00:18:34:21 - 00:19:00:18
Chris Magwood: In this case, this is for one cubic meter of whatever this anonymous material is. And this is how many the emissions associated with making that one cubic meter. So if you think of our embodied carbon math, if you had ten cubic meters of this particular material in your building, you would have ten times 450kg, 40 500kg of emissions associated with that material.
00:19:00:18 - 00:19:07:29
Chris Magwood: So that's kind of what's going to be under the hood of of the standard.
00:19:08:01 - 00:19:32:09
Chris Magwood: We had to go through and decide what building products we were going to include in the building. So what what things are in and what things are out. Obviously, there's a balance to be had between the things that a builder has a choice on things that there's enough data for, things that that make enough difference in the embodied carbon to bother counting.
00:19:32:11 - 00:20:04:25
Chris Magwood: So if you take a look at the standard, you'll see there's a pretty extensive table of all the things that are in. And there's also a table of all the things that are very specifically excluded. And I'll sort of highlight those because in some ways there's the list of exclusions is smaller than the list of inclusions, but we're not including anything about the work of the site or driveways or any landscaping, balconies, porches and decks that aren't part of the structure of the home are not included.
00:20:04:27 - 00:20:30:14
Chris Magwood: Anything that's not permanent. So things like formwork. So materials that you use but then take away the appliances inside the building. Amitri millwork, gutters, soffit, fascia, fasteners, connectors, controls, valves and light fixtures all for various reasons of not enough data or not important enough are not going to be included.
00:20:30:16 - 00:20:58:27
Chris Magwood: The standard sets up to two different types of assessment that can be done for embodied carbon. Ideally, both of these happen, but but to sort of mimic the Hers rating system and the sort of the procedure of a project, there's this projected assessment and that's what you generate prior to the building being constructed. So you want to know sort of where you're aimed with embodied carbon.
00:20:58:27 - 00:21:22:29
Chris Magwood: You want to be able to, you know, look at the plans and make any adjustments. If you're in a jurisdiction where there's a requirement or an incentive to report your embody carbon, obviously you can't, you know, you can only report the projected before you build the building. And then ideally, once the building is done, there's a pathway for doing confirmed assessments.
00:21:22:29 - 00:21:42:22
Chris Magwood: So that's where the building has been built. The Herz reader has been on site a few times and doing their inspections for the energy efficiency side of things. They're also doing inspections or able to do inspections on the embodied carbon so that we know, yes, the things that you've said you're going to do over here in the projected assessment, did they actually happen?
00:21:42:22 - 00:21:52:00
Chris Magwood: And if not, we can adjust the model to suit the the as built version of the of the construction.
00:21:52:02 - 00:22:26:25
Chris Magwood: And that verification. Again, we were, you know, aligning ourselves very closely with the with the procedures that are hers rader would undertake. And so the verification follows the same kind of methodology that that a hers rater would use to do verification work on the energy efficiency side. So basically, while you're on site, you know, looking at the types of products, the brands of products and, and comparing that to the original assessment and making any adjustments for changes that were made in the field.
00:22:26:27 - 00:22:52:05
Chris Magwood: And so by and large, that verification procedure is, you know, just making sure that the building is the size and shape and has all the the dimensions that were assumed in the plans. And then to make sure that we know which brands of products were used and collecting the photos or receipts or other documents that it would take to sort of be able to to prove that.
00:22:52:08 - 00:23:18:21
Chris Magwood: In the software wise, there isn't any software that can do a 1550 compliant assessment right now because there is no completed 1550. So there will obviously be a bit of a lag between the software, between the standard being published and the software being available to do it. But there are representatives from from two different software firms on the standards committee.
00:23:18:21 - 00:24:05:19
Chris Magwood: And, you know, presumably there will be efforts underway to to make software that will kind of do all the work, the hard work of the following, the standard for you as a user. And one of the things that has been happening prior to the standard coming out in Massachusetts, there's been this 100 home study to try to come up with a benchmark embodied carbon for homes in that state, but that kicked off an integration of the software, the eco trope software that's a Herz rating software, where the Herz Raiders already put lots of the information about the building in, and there's now a prototype connection between echo and the beam rating software.
00:24:05:19 - 00:24:30:20
Chris Magwood: So, as I was saying earlier, you know, you're able to take as much information that you put into echo trope that's valuable to the embodied carbon model and just port it over to beam so you're not having to to double enter. And that, I'm sure, will happen more and more once the standard is available. So that's that's the sort of the outline of the standard.
00:24:30:20 - 00:24:54:00
Chris Magwood: And I'm going to sort of show you, you know, with a standard like that or even before the standard, you know, what we can do about embodied carbon in new construction. And this is our kind of stock slide of the embodied carbon reduction hierarchy, the kind of like, you know, impactful steps that you can that you can take to reduce embodied carbon and buildings.
00:24:54:01 - 00:25:18:24
Chris Magwood: You'll notice we've sort of I've struck the last two out here not because they're not important, but because the ResNet 1550 standard isn't looking at transporting materials to site, isn't looking at end of life, isn't looking at at circular construction. So really, you know, ResNet is going to give you some real clarity on these first three parts of the hierarchy.
00:25:18:26 - 00:25:48:27
Chris Magwood: So the first one is using less stuff that that can come in sort of three basic flavors. One being reusing things, whether that thing be a whole building. So instead of tearing down an old building to build a new one, you know, can you keep the old building? Can you keep a fair bit of the old building? And the reason for that, from an embodied carbon point of view, is the emissions it took to make those materials originally back whenever that building was made, they're already in the atmosphere.
00:25:48:27 - 00:26:15:00
Chris Magwood: So if you can not have to make a whole suite of materials to replace them, the embodied carbon of the project is lower. Same goes for if you're just reusing some of the materials or getting used materials from another site to put into a new building, anything where the emissions have already happened in the past don't sort of count as as new embodied carbon because they're they're not responsible for any emissions today.
00:26:15:03 - 00:26:36:26
Chris Magwood: Right sizing and dematerialization. This is sort of looking at your building. We're going to we'll check out a couple examples of that in the next couple of slides. But this is the stuff where people do think about embodied carbon. I think the notion is, oh, I got to start switching products. But really, you know, thinking about embodied carbon starts here with, you know, what do I actually need to use?
00:26:36:26 - 00:27:09:21
Chris Magwood: How little of it can I use? And am I using the appropriate amounts of them? So I'm going to show you a couple of examples. You know, here's the little plus sign looking things. That's just like a, you know, a simple sound for a building. And so if that building is 120ft², and I use a ten inch wide concrete wall for the foundation of that building, I need 34 and a bit yards of concrete for that foundation.
00:27:09:24 - 00:27:34:12
Chris Magwood: But if I can make that same foundation with the wall only being eight inches wide, you know I'm down to 27.7 yards. So I haven't changed the kind of concrete I'm using or whether or not I'm using concrete. I'm just using less if my code allows that and if the structure doesn't require it, you know, lots of times we tend to just use more material, just, you know, to be on the safe side.
00:27:34:12 - 00:27:59:03
Chris Magwood: So if you can kind of do some value engineering, you might find that that you don't need as much of these materials as you thought. And so, you know, in this case it's a 20% savings. And when you when you use less in embodied carbon terms, the, the, the embodied carbon reduction tracks. Exactly. So if you use 20% less concrete, your emissions will be 20% less.
00:27:59:03 - 00:28:24:10
Chris Magwood: So that's sort of one part of using less stuff. The other part of using less stuff is here's this same foundation. We're going to leave it being ten inches the concrete, being ten inches thick because we need to. But if we just, you know, squeeze the the size of the building down slightly, you know, this is, I think, shaving just under 10% off the size of the building.
00:28:24:11 - 00:28:33:24
Chris Magwood: Again, we get a 10% reduction in the embodied carbon for having used 10% less material.
00:28:33:26 - 00:28:47:21
Chris Magwood: Now, if we combine both of those measures a little bit thinner, a little bit smaller, you know, we've added those savings together. And now we're seeing a 30% reduction from those two measures.
00:28:47:23 - 00:29:06:08
Chris Magwood: Now the next step in the hierarchy is what I call using better versions of the same stuff. So this is where we're not we're not getting into, you know, changing out product type A for product type B. So in this example we're still using concrete. We've decided how much we're going to use and how thick it's going to be.
00:29:06:10 - 00:29:31:11
Chris Magwood: And all of those things are set. Now we're kind of into the procurement decisions. The the what type of concrete am I going to get, which supplier am I going to use to supply me? And just to sort of give you a sense of what's on the table when it comes to that, you know, this same foundation, there's 7390kg of emissions if we use just like a very standard mix.
00:29:31:11 - 00:30:05:02
Chris Magwood: This is based on the, the, the NCAA's, you know, national average for concrete, the NCAA's best low carbon mix. So same strength category, you know, all lots of the same characteristics but different ingredients to get you to that same strength. The emissions there would be down to 4725kg. So a 36% savings from looking at, you know, what kind of what kind of concrete am I going to get?
00:30:05:03 - 00:30:30:19
Chris Magwood: Who am I going to get it from, and what goes into the mix. So there's a substantial amount of savings there. Now, if you think back to our previous example, if we can save 30% by making it thinner and smaller and then this 36% from using a beggar mix, we've almost half the carbon footprint of this foundation. So these things are not, you know, exclusive ways to ways to reduce embodied carbon.
00:30:30:19 - 00:30:55:04
Chris Magwood: Ideally, they're sort of additive and, and you can put them together. So another example of using better versions of the same stuff we can look at at a category like drywall, we use lots of it in homes like a fairly typical homes got around 4000ft² of half inch drywall. And what I'm showing you here is the the global warming potential of five different brands.
00:30:55:04 - 00:31:21:20
Chris Magwood: So if you went to a retailer and picked up these sheets of drywall, everything about them would be the same. You know, they have very similar performance characteristics, very similar price. You know, all of the, you know, all of that kind of stuff is really similar. But, you know, if you look at the difference between the brand with the highest embodied carbon and the brand with the lowest embodied carbon, there's a 65% difference in that spread.
00:31:21:21 - 00:31:45:22
Chris Magwood: And so this is where, you know, you're still going to use drywall in this building, but you think, oh, you know, I'm going to choose brand A instead of brand B, because look, their embodied carbon is 60% lower. So that's, you know, another look at how we can use better versions of the same stuff to reduce embodied carbon.
00:31:45:24 - 00:32:12:22
Chris Magwood: And then there's the piece in the hierarchy that I call using better stuff. And this is now thinking about different product types. So I'm going to use as the example here exterior cladding for a home. So I'm saying we've got a home that needs 2000ft² of exterior cladding being covered. Here's the the average GWP for 12 different cladding types.
00:32:12:22 - 00:32:37:13
Chris Magwood: And I'm going to I'm going to you know, as a caveat here, say you saw on the drywall example how big the spread can be in any one category. There is a spread in all of these categories. So what I'm showing you is the average for brick and the average for acrylic, stucco, etc. but the worst performing brick and the best performing brick, there's a pretty big spread there.
00:32:37:13 - 00:33:05:26
Chris Magwood: And so it may be that the best performing brick is as good as natural stone, you know, or the the worst performing steel panel is, you know, anyway, you get the idea. There's a range here, but if we take their averages again, you can sort of see from from brick at the, at the top end of the spectrum to natural wood at the bottom end, there's almost 100% difference between the embodied carbon of those options.
00:33:05:28 - 00:33:31:29
Chris Magwood: Now, I know there's all kinds of reasons you would use brick instead of wood or, you know, wood instead of fiber cement. You know, embodied carbon is not the sole reason that you would be making these choices, but it is a good thing to be looking at. And if your, your, your the needs for your building, the esthetics of the building, the cost you know, that you're trying to aim for, for the building happens to align with a better embodied carbon choice.
00:33:32:02 - 00:33:46:02
Chris Magwood: You know, there's a there's a good reason to be doing that. And you can see, you know, the spread here is wide enough that that it is worth considering.
00:33:46:05 - 00:34:11:04
Chris Magwood: Now, I added this little section just for this presentation, which I'm sort of tongue in cheek calling. Use your judgment instead of use less stuff for different stuff. And that's because the the standard, the 1550 standard is going to include mechanical, electrical and plumbing equipment as part of the assessment. This is really new, most especially residential embodied carbon.
00:34:11:05 - 00:34:40:15
Chris Magwood: You know, assessments have not included this in the past, but the committee did a lot of work to find really good default values that we could use for this. So, you know, in in the range of MEP equipment that we're including, most of the products, there's not very good representation of individual products with their own individual. So in a lot of cases for the the MEP section, you're going to be using defaults.
00:34:40:17 - 00:35:08:05
Chris Magwood: And and everybody's going to be using essentially the same numbers. But the things that that vary are, you know, the square footage. So things like electrical wiring, we're just using industry standards for, you know, for a house of, you know, X square feet, you tend to use X amount of electrical wire, cable and switches and boxes, etc.. So those are just, you know, standard baked in calculations.
00:35:08:07 - 00:35:37:18
Chris Magwood: But, you know, there are differences between the embodied carbon of a domestic tank, hot water heater and a tankless and, you know, heat pump, hot water heater and etc. all the way down the list. You'll see with the mechanical, you know, you can put in, you know, a variety of different types of, of equipment, and you will get some, some standard embodied carbon information back for, for all of those.
00:35:37:21 - 00:35:59:13
Chris Magwood: So I'm going to now show you a couple case studies. So with the home builders can group at RMI, one of the things we do is is build up a case study library. So this is one of I think these are there's about 14 case studies in the library right now. So you can go to the website and and download these.
00:35:59:20 - 00:36:23:06
Chris Magwood: I'm just going to show you a couple of them. And the reason that I want to show them to you is just, you know, to, to show you that, that thinking about embodied carbon isn't that hard. You know, there are lots of builders doing it already in advance of the standard and that some of the changes and some of the, you know, the design changes, the product changes, all of that stuff.
00:36:23:08 - 00:36:47:02
Chris Magwood: There's always an assumption that these kinds of things are going to be more expensive. And so most of our case studies feature buildings where the the builder kind of did all of this work and was like, oh, that actually didn't really cost more, or sometimes it even cost less. So that's that's very much what, what this particular case study is looking.
00:36:47:03 - 00:37:09:25
Chris Magwood: You can see that Cody Fisher from Footprint Development, who sort of led this project, you know, set a third of the embodied carbon reduction that they found here was cost neutral. So, you know, basically looking for the low hanging fruit, you can see that this this building, it's a small multifamily building. It really did do a great job on embodied carbon.
00:37:09:25 - 00:37:41:12
Chris Magwood: So, you know, we found that about 200kg per of emissions per square meter is a pretty average home. And you can see that that this building got down to 40. So, you know that's a really significant reduction. They did things like target low GWP concrete, the cellulose wall and acoustic insulation etc. you can sort of you can check out the case study and look at all of the ways that that they did that.
00:37:41:14 - 00:38:05:09
Chris Magwood: But you know I want to show you one multifamily building. I think a lot of people think that some of these embodied carbon interventions kind of only work on really small, really custom homes. So, you know, this is an example of a of a multifamily building. Also want to point out that we try to, in our case studies, feature buildings that have kind of addressed the operational side of their emissions as well.
00:38:05:09 - 00:38:30:19
Chris Magwood: So in this case this building has a core certification and it's all electric. So it's it's operating emissions are already super low. And so kind of the next frontier for a builder like that is to is to bring the embodied carbon down. Similarly on the on the single family side, actually this is not a single family. It's a duplex.
00:38:30:21 - 00:38:56:29
Chris Magwood: But same kind of approach. What is the what are the what's the low hanging fruit when it comes to embodied carbon, you'll see that there are actually some similarities between some of the choices in in this project here and the previous one. But cellulose insulation, wood, fiberboard, denim, bat insulation, some sustainably harvested wood in this case it was a panelist construction.
00:38:57:00 - 00:39:27:12
Chris Magwood: So sort of making it easier to to put some of those products that lots of builders aren't necessarily familiar with, being able to put them together. But again, a building that is passive house levels of energy performance all electric and again, getting sort of about 75% reduction from typical embodied carbon. So just wanting to to show you a couple examples where it's like, yeah, you know, we can do this today.
00:39:27:12 - 00:40:05:20
Chris Magwood: If I were to show you, you know, buildings where they've made their energy performance 75% better, that would be kind of jaw dropping. But right now, embodied carbon is so new and the the understanding of it and where we are and sort of our baseline buildings means that there is that kind of low hanging fruit right now, if you think about those of us who have worked on energy efficiency, building or energy efficient buildings for a long time, you know, things like making the building more airtight, going from single to double pane windows, those sorts of steps, you know, 25, 30 years ago made huge gains in energy efficiency.
00:40:05:20 - 00:40:24:05
Chris Magwood: And we're kind of at that point with embodied carbon, where there just is a lot of low hanging fruit. If you can use something like the 1550 standard to find it, it's not actually that hard to implement it in a way that that makes a really big difference.
00:40:24:07 - 00:40:57:10
Chris Magwood: So in a return to to my s curve here. So you know, we now do have this standard or we will have the standard soon. I would expect it to be published, you know, sometime around the middle of this calendar year. So coming soon. So that gives us the ability to calculate. But we still have a long way to go before our buildings are kind of at the zero or very near zero emissions that they need to be for the climate to stay within reasonable balance.
00:40:57:10 - 00:41:38:29
Chris Magwood: And so, you know, we need things like mandatory reporting, mandatory limits, actually reducing those mandatory limits and then getting into to carbon storage before we're really going to be able to address that huge pool of emissions that new homes in the US represent. As I showed you at the at the start, if you're looking for some resources to to go a little deeper, the hidden climate impact of residential construction is a report that my colleagues and I did at RMI, the kind of summarizes all of the residential embodied carbon studies that we could find.
00:41:39:01 - 00:42:04:27
Chris Magwood: And then some of those individual studies you can see here as well. And the beam tool is a is a free tool. Like I said, it doesn't calculate according to the 1550 standard. Right now the methodologies are very similar, but the range of products that is included and some of the, you know, the nuances aren't exactly in line with 1550, but will be soon.
00:42:04:28 - 00:42:22:23
Chris Magwood: The beam tool is what was used for most of the studies you can see on the screen here. And so with that, I will wrap up the formal part of the presentation and glad to get into some Q&A.
00:42:22:25 - 00:42:51:20
Mike Collignon: All right. Thank you sir. Just gathering up some of the questions that we've got from our audience and wanted to go ahead and pose a couple of those to you. Now, Chris, the first question that came in was, is the standard going to align with material standards that are published by ASTM and or UL or United Laboratories?
00:42:51:22 - 00:43:23:19
Chris Magwood: Well, and no, I mean, those two organizations don't look at embodied carbon, but the most typical scenario is, you know, what the standard does is give you an embodied carbon, a DWP factor for products that have already met those standards and can be used in buildings. So, for example, you know, like if I just pick up a stick from outside, I could say, well, this stick ways this much.
00:43:23:20 - 00:43:45:05
Chris Magwood: And so this must be the embodied carbon of it if I'm looking at this factor, but I can't legally use that stick to hold up my house. But if I go to the lumber yard and get, you know, a grade stamp piece of lumber, I'd use the same embodied carbon number to assess the grade stamped lumber as the stick.
00:43:45:07 - 00:44:19:11
Chris Magwood: And so, you know, those ASTM and UL standards, those are there to sort of ensure that products do what they're supposed to do performance wise. And then the standard says, and here's the embodied carbon number for a product that meets those requirements. So they're not they don't quite overlap. But you would, you know, in the list of products that are included in the 1550 standard, they're all products that we use in buildings now and that have met all of the performance requirements to to go into a building.
00:44:19:13 - 00:44:34:16
Mike Collignon: Okay. So Frank had a question. You kind of gave us all a little bit of a teaser when you were talking about the different drywall options. He's want to know, can you name some brand names here for better carbon options?
00:44:34:19 - 00:44:58:23
Chris Magwood: I'm not going to do that here. But I would say like that all of those numbers come from the beam tool, and the beam tool does name names. I just don't like to, you know, pick on anybody or, you know, elevate somebody because, you know, it's there's never a silver bullet, right. You could decide. Nope. I really like high GWP drywall brand.
00:44:58:23 - 00:45:20:23
Chris Magwood: And I'm going to stick with that because I'm, you know, I'm dropping my embodied carbon emissions by using a lower carbon concrete or different windows or a different insulation. So like until you're at the point of, you know, we've kind of designed the building and we're picking products, I don't I don't like to I don't like to name names if, if I don't have to.
00:45:20:26 - 00:45:49:24
Mike Collignon: And that's fine. That's kind of what I figured anyway. But I you know, one of the things we do here is we always try and get to all the questions we can. So I appreciate it and I understand the situation you're in there. So let's stick with the drywall for just a second though, if we can. Chris, the Chloe wants to know what accounts for the embodied carbon difference with the different drywall types and other products within the same kind of product category?
00:45:50:00 - 00:45:56:22
Mike Collignon: She's want to know, does it have anything to do with maybe how clean the power grid is in the location where it's produced?
00:45:56:24 - 00:46:16:28
Chris Magwood: Yep. That's that's a big part of it. So yeah, the whatever the manufacturing process is. So that can start with where did the raw materials come from. You know, is this a deep mine or a surface mine is you know, sometimes there are differences in that, in that the sourcing of the raw material can have a lower carbon footprint.
00:46:17:01 - 00:46:39:02
Chris Magwood: Then we add the transportation of the raw material to a factory. So if you know you're getting raw materials from the northwest, but you're manufacturing them in Florida, you know, that's going to put it up. And then yeah, to to you know, to her point the, the, the the types of fuels being used in, in the manufacturing, you know.
00:46:39:03 - 00:46:53:17
Chris Magwood: Yeah. Cleaner grids, good heat recovery. You know, all of those things like the more efficient the factory the lower the embodied carbon should be. So that that's kind of what's showing up in in most of those products.
00:46:53:19 - 00:47:04:12
Mike Collignon: Okay. Ashley wanted to know, can this standard be used when renovating existing buildings or the renovation of existing buildings.
00:47:04:13 - 00:47:29:14
Chris Magwood: Yeah, yeah. So there's a there's a renovation piece embedded in the standard two which pretty it's pretty simple. It says don't count embodied carbon for anything that you're leaving in place. So you would just count embodied carbon for new materials that you're bringing into the building. So like I said before, we kind of assume emissions from existing materials like they're in the atmosphere now.
00:47:29:14 - 00:47:51:07
Chris Magwood: We can't do anything about them. So, you know, the new the person doing the renovation sort of doesn't have to own that. But so for renovations, it's really just, what are you changing out and, and you would do the same process, but usually just on a smaller range of products, like maybe you're just putting in a bathtub, you would just look at the embodied carbon or the bathtub.
00:47:51:07 - 00:48:00:15
Chris Magwood: If it's a whole bathroom retrofit, you'd look at the flooring and the drywall, you know, and, and all the things that you're going to add.
00:48:00:17 - 00:48:17:18
Mike Collignon: All right. We got more great questions, Chris. We're going to keep rolling here. So some wanted to know what happens when a building design doesn't match what is actually built from a regulatory context.
00:48:17:21 - 00:48:46:14
Chris Magwood: Well, I mean, I guess like building permits and like, you know, the, the, the structural integrity and the energy efficiency of the building, like, that's not part of our standard. But if if you're doing a verified, if you're verifying the the assessment, the, the radar on site would be like, oh, you know, that window is twice as big as it said it was going to be in the plans.
00:48:46:14 - 00:49:11:25
Chris Magwood: So I have to go back now to my embodied carbon assessment and, you know, change the window from being, you know, two feet by 3ft to 6ft by eight feet. And I'm going to get a different embodied carbon number or whatever changes are noted on site. You you make sure that the final verified embodied carbon assessment matches what, what was actually built.
00:49:11:25 - 00:49:29:16
Chris Magwood: So that could be. Oh, they said here that that to our drywall conversation. You know, this was supposed to be drywall brand A I get to site. It's actually drywall brand B we're going to have to go change that in the in the assessment.
00:49:29:18 - 00:49:43:17
Mike Collignon: Another really interesting question really is from my perspective from Mary, has durability been factored in and if not, is there something that will be considered in the future.
00:49:43:19 - 00:50:22:12
Chris Magwood: It I mean it has not been included because it's it it's hard to include I guess would be the the main thing. So again we're not this standard doesn't say product A is more durable than product B. That's going to be the call of whoever's designing the building. Where that does impact embodied carbon is, you know, if you put in a product that lasts, you know, ten years and then you have to replace it, you're going to you're going to be creating more embodied carbon ten years from now.
00:50:22:12 - 00:50:47:06
Chris Magwood: If you put in a product lasted 20 years from the get go, like it's embodied carbon happened once, but doesn't have to happen again until 20 years in general. You know, the length of time that the things that stay in the building for this standard, like everything is sort of in the, you know, 15 to 20 year kind of lifespan range.
00:50:47:06 - 00:51:24:16
Chris Magwood: So that's why we're not counting a lot of things, you know, like appliances and stuff that tend to be changed out more often. But it's also really hard to, you know, we either have to go with a lot of assumptions like, you know, this product is going to last ten years, but what if it lasts 30? Or what if the product that was supposed to last 30 years, the house sells, and the person you know that has the 30 year product rips it out because they would like something else anyway like that, what happens, you know, in the future of the building, it does have climate implications for sure, but ones that are very hard
00:51:24:16 - 00:51:52:15
Chris Magwood: for us to predict and for, like the building's designer and builder, to kind of own at day one. But we will be looking at how to how to think about that more holistically down the road. But it was, you know, the sort of network of assumptions and trying to figure out how to navigate that. We just didn't take that on in this in this round.
00:51:52:18 - 00:52:22:13
Mike Collignon: Well, I can see that certainly being a challenge for something like this, because I think a lot of our audience may or may not know, I don't know. Ratings are an assessment at that specific moment in time, and things can change on the property that would make that property be rated very differently were the rating to be done again in that future, that would say, well, this doesn't match the rating from four or 5 or 10 years ago.
00:52:22:16 - 00:52:37:06
Mike Collignon: And that's just the inherent nature of ratings is it's looking at that snapshot in time. So I can see where, you know, a homeowner, a new homeowner, a different homeowner makes changes. Now all of a sudden that at home isn't going to be the same. It isn't the same.
00:52:37:07 - 00:53:08:27
Chris Magwood: And I think, you know, somebody if you're if you are concerned about durability, you know, as a, as a designer, you sort of know what the anticipated lifespan of some of these products are. You can take a look and go, well, yep, this product has a higher embodied carbon. Im going to choose it because I can see that replacing it with this other one that's going to need three lifetime replacements in the same time as the high end body carbon one isn't going to work out well, so that's fine.
00:53:08:27 - 00:53:30:20
Chris Magwood: Or you can look and go, oh, you could replace this material ten times before it has the embodied carbon of this one that's really high. It doesn't matter that it's not as durable. Those kinds of conclusions, you'll be able to extrapolate that from doing an assessment. But the assessment isn't going to tell you those things.
00:53:30:22 - 00:53:42:12
Mike Collignon: Now let's let's stick with the durability topic for just a second, Chris, because Jacob wants to ask, you know, isn't durability kind of calculated into the EPD?
00:53:42:14 - 00:54:04:15
Chris Magwood: No, not really. So the EPD is like the part of the EPD we're reading is like, what were the emissions associated with getting this product ready to to, you know, to go out to a building. So no, like, I could I could create a lot of emissions, making something that melts three days after I ship it out from the factory.
00:54:04:15 - 00:54:27:24
Chris Magwood: Or I could create hardly any emissions and make something that's going to last a thousand years. It like the the amount of emissions that it took to make it is never directly linked to how long it might last. So they're there to kind of separate things. In an EPD you will see what the manufacturers, you know, anticipated lifespan for that product is.
00:54:27:26 - 00:55:00:02
Chris Magwood: And that is something that that you could use as your own guide to like, am I making a good, long, durable choice here or not? But you know, anybody who's been in the building world knows that the manufacturers recommended lifespan maybe much longer or much shorter than than what happens in the real world. So I think, you know, people in the building design world are savvy enough to be able to understand that piece.
00:55:00:05 - 00:55:19:21
Chris Magwood: You know, we're not positing that embodied carbon is the only reason you would make any building choice. It's sort of one of many stacked reasons. You know, we're all aiming for healthy, energy efficient, code compliant. You know, there's a whole list of criteria. And and the 1550 standard will let you put embodied carbon as one of those criteria.
00:55:19:21 - 00:55:40:05
Chris Magwood: And, you know, it's not likely going to be the main reason you make choices, but it could be a good supplementary reason. Oh, I could use X or Y. They all seem pretty similar. You know, nobody there's not much difference between them. Oh, let's look at the embodied carbon. Oh. Like there's a clear choice you know, from that perspective.
00:55:40:06 - 00:55:59:00
Chris Magwood: But I wouldn't you know, I wouldn't want to see people using an embodied carbon standard to design a building that's not, you know, that's not what it's for. Its to inform your, your sort of design and procurement choices towards, you know, being better for the climate.
00:55:59:02 - 00:56:15:19
Mike Collignon: Okay. So a question came in from Ted. Does the standard recognize the difference in embodied carbon between organic materials versus man made materials.
00:56:15:22 - 00:56:19:19
Chris Magwood: So well.
00:56:19:22 - 00:56:44:11
Chris Magwood: Yes and no. So if if a product has has, is made from sort of biomass from biogenic carbon, then that that is something that's tracked in the standard. So you sort of see if it's, if it's a product that's made from plant material, you'll see the emissions it took to make that product, but also the amount of carbon that's physically stored in it.
00:56:44:11 - 00:57:13:01
Chris Magwood: So that in that way it's you see those two things. But if you, you know, if you have like a stone where you have concrete, which is sort of like synthetic stone, you know, you can find the product rating for Stone, you can find the product rating for concrete. But it's, you know, there's the GWP doesn't it doesn't matter whether it's manmade or or naturally occurring.
00:57:13:03 - 00:57:16:03
Mike Collignon: Okay.
00:57:16:06 - 00:57:30:21
Mike Collignon: So a question came in from Frank. Is the MEP info also now available in the generic beam tool and the hot 2000 MCE two?
00:57:30:23 - 00:57:54:08
Chris Magwood: No, no, I'm assuming it's going to show up in those tools right after the standard comes out. But I think, you know, everybody's waiting for the standard to come out to know that they're picking the right numbers. So I would I would assume that there's going to be some, some alignment with those tools and the standard pretty quickly.
00:57:54:10 - 00:58:13:18
Mike Collignon: Okay. Okay. So another question came in from Colleen up to what size multifamily project is this going to cover. Your case study talked about a four story home. But is this thing meant for mid-rise or high rise as well?
00:58:13:21 - 00:58:45:14
Chris Magwood: It certainly could be used that way. I think the, the, the, the line will sort of come depending a bit on construction types and like who's involved in the in the design and the energy analysis side. So you know, the kinds of typologies. This is really aimed at the typologies that hers raiders already rate, which is, you know, pretty typically like five stories and under often wood frame or CMU, some concrete buildings.
00:58:45:14 - 00:59:10:17
Chris Magwood: But you know that that building typology, if you have a hers writer doing it, it makes a lot of sense to use 1550 because they're going to be able to use the same information. If you are designing larger buildings, concrete building, steel buildings, you're making BIM models. You know, there are standards and softwares, you know, already out there for that kind of construction and that kind of model building.
00:59:10:17 - 00:59:35:05
Chris Magwood: So I would say, you know, you would want to use the one that's kind of appropriate for what you're doing, gives you the kind of answers you want. If you're hers, rating your buildings, it's probably good to use 1550. If you're not and you're doing larger buildings, you probably want to use something that works with your software.
00:59:35:07 - 01:00:01:15
Mike Collignon: So I really like this question that Brenda sent in, because this is, I think, something that often gets either overlooked or underappreciated in our industry. She wants to know our financial institutions and appraisers recognizing embodied carbon and energy efficiency standards in underwriting and valuation for any type of residential property, new or existing.
01:00:01:17 - 01:00:38:04
Chris Magwood: The answer to that is not yet. But in talking in my in my job, I talked to a lot of people in the financial world, and all of them basically wanted some sort of standard like this so that they could start looking at that. You know, if people are just going to sort of like randomly come up with a, you know, lifecycle assessment number for a building and try to use that it's hard for does anybody, you know, in the regulatory world, whether that's code officials or, you know, investors or financial people, like what does this number mean?
01:00:38:04 - 01:00:57:19
Chris Magwood: Am I looking at a good number of bad number? Who did it. Like what were the assumptions. But what I'm hoping is that now with with when 1550 comes out, that yes, like we will be able to start making some of those inroads because, you know, they will be able to say, you know, we'll give you extra whatever if you meet this threshold.
01:00:57:19 - 01:01:27:11
Chris Magwood: And we know that's a good threshold because, you know, we've gotten lots of results out of 1550 standard. And we know what's average and good and bad and able to start making some of those judgment calls. So, you know, that's for me and our team at RMI. That's a big reason for doing the standard, is you need something like that to be able to underpin the kinds of decisions that we want those kind of financial people to be able to make.
01:01:27:14 - 01:01:51:24
Mike Collignon: So we've got a couple other questions and then we're we'll wrap up here. We hit on this a little bit earlier, but I think there's a little bit more to this question. So it's a two parter. Is the geographical location important to embodied carbon. But also part of it is not just what we talked about earlier about, oh, maybe because it's on a clean power grid.
01:01:51:26 - 01:02:00:27
Mike Collignon: The question is going a little bit more towards the accessibility to items, or maybe some of the climate risks that are included.
01:02:00:29 - 01:02:29:27
Chris Magwood: Yeah. So yeah, geography makes a big difference. You know, like you said, like if where the factory is and what kind, what its power grid looks like and how far it has to move raw materials matters for sure. On the flip side, you know, again, this is this is a tool you might look at, you know, be looking at say the beam tool and go, oh, I really would love to get drywall product.
01:02:29:29 - 01:02:59:21
Chris Magwood: A there's not a single retailer with 500 miles of me that carries that, like just not going to be able to. And, you know, it's unlikely to be the right decision to be like, well, I'm going to put two skids on a truck and, you know, drive it, you know, 1500 miles to get to my site. You know, by the time you've done that, there's a good chance you've created more emissions than you've saved by going with product A.
01:02:59:24 - 01:03:21:21
Chris Magwood: So I think, you know, geography right now will be a limitation. I know, you know, when I showed sort of average concrete and low embodied carbon concrete, not every small rural batching plant will make, you know, low embodied carbon concrete right now because there's not enough demand. They don't sort of silo the ingredients that need to go in it.
01:03:21:21 - 01:03:31:14
Chris Magwood: So, you know, there is there will definitely be limitations to what products you can get based on your geography.
01:03:31:16 - 01:03:44:22
Mike Collignon: So I'm going to kind of reword this question a little bit, because we're talking about a standard that isn't finished yet. And I think you said the hope is that they were going to try and publish something in the middle of the year. Is that correct?
01:03:44:24 - 01:03:47:29
Chris Magwood: Seems like we're kind of on track to do that yet.
01:03:48:01 - 01:03:55:00
Mike Collignon: Okay, so let me reword this question slightly.
01:03:55:02 - 01:04:19:13
Mike Collignon: Who is going to employ hers? Embodied carbon raiders. And is this really is this geared towards like construction companies that are going to voluntarily care about this, or is this more focused at cities or something else?
01:04:19:16 - 01:04:39:22
Chris Magwood: Am I allowed to say all of the above? I think, you know, the standard committee has. It's a really interesting mix of some really small, really progressive home builders who, you know, been at the forefront of energy efficiency and passive house and stuff for a long time. And they're kind of seeing this as, you know, an important next frontier.
01:04:39:26 - 01:05:00:17
Chris Magwood: We also have representatives from a lot of the leading Builders of America group, which are the sort of 20 largest production home builders in the country, because they know this stuff is important to they want to understand it, they want to be at the table. They're going to be, you know, training their own staff and or their hers raters to to look at it.
01:05:00:19 - 01:05:22:15
Chris Magwood: You know, some people are going to do it voluntarily, you know, cities and, and, and states are going to start to, you know, once there is a standard, be able to set a threshold and, you know, likely with voluntary incentive programs first, but eventually it will become a code regulated.
01:05:22:17 - 01:05:47:26
Chris Magwood: You know, aspect of a building already. You know, California has its Cal green code, which is an embodied carbon code. Oregon is about to move into a doing an incentive program. But ahead of doing codes where I am in Canada, you know, the city of Vancouver is already doing embodied carbon programs like that. So it's coming. I think the people who are going to use 1550 first are the ones who want to be ahead of that curve.
01:05:47:27 - 01:06:07:29
Chris Magwood: Like, I'd rather know now and understand this and be able to do this and know where I'm at, know where that low hanging fruit is, know how much it's going to cost, all of those sorts of things before it's code. But I think, you know, the codes are are definitely, you know, coming in the next five years or so.
01:06:08:02 - 01:06:33:20
Mike Collignon: And let's, let's go back to the first part of their question. Does the committee I'm not going to say you, Chris. You get to answers. But like does the committee kind of envy that existing hers readers are also going to then pick up embodied carbon ratings? Or do they think that there would be a whole separate group of individuals focusing on the standard 1550?
01:06:33:21 - 01:07:04:22
Chris Magwood: Yeah, I think our assumption and, you know, we have quite a few, both like hers Raiders and hers rating companies at the table. You know, they see this as I'm already I'm already doing 80% of what I need to do to make one of these embodied carbon models. Some of the the folks working on that 100 home study in Massachusetts are finding it's an hour to add embodied carbon to the work I already do because we tried to align, you know, the workflow of the hers rater and say, like, what are you modeling?
01:07:04:23 - 01:07:25:20
Chris Magwood: Like, what numbers do you already have? How do we translate those into embodied carbon? We've kind of made it as easy as possible for hers rater to do it. I don't think, you know, somebody might want to go into an embodied carbon, only hers writing practice. But I doubt they're going to do all that well financially, you know, until the market grows.
01:07:25:20 - 01:07:45:16
Chris Magwood: But for somebody who's already doing hers ratings to, you know, it's a big it's a big additional piece that you can offer your clients for a relatively small investment in, in time to be able to do it. So I'm assuming, you know, both the builders and the hers Raiders, you know, sometimes it'll be the builder asking the hers rater to do it.
01:07:45:16 - 01:08:10:21
Chris Magwood: Sometimes it'll be the hers rater saying, hey, I just got certified in 1550. Like, I could be doing this for you now. But I think and it doesn't just have to be hers. Raiders. You know, folks who do face or passive House could be doing this. Basically anybody who's making an energy model of a building, you've done the majority of the work to be able to do an embodied carbon model to.
01:08:10:23 - 01:08:24:23
Mike Collignon: Gotcha. Well, thank you, Chris. I definitely appreciate the presentation. I know our audience was very intrigued and inquisitive about it. So thank you very much for taking the time to walk through this with us.
01:08:24:24 - 01:08:31:17
Chris Magwood: Yeah. Thanks to you and the team at Green Builder and everybody who took an hour and a bit out of their day to listen.
01:08:31:19 - 01:08:54:00
Mike Collignon: Yeah. And also thank you to Powershift by N.V. energy for their generous sponsorship. Now, in case you haven't registered yet and I know that you will, the Green Builder Media Sustainability Symposium is coming soon to a computer screen near you. It's going to take place on April 30th and May 1st. And it's going to go from 12 to 3 p.m. eastern each day.
01:08:54:01 - 01:09:20:10
Mike Collignon: Now, this wonderful event that I get the honor to MC is completely free, so don't miss it. Just go to Green Builder Media com to register now. And between now and then we'll have another housing 2.0 workshop on April the 3rd with Sam. And we'll be talking about the Water Energy Nexus with Darren Waske on April 9th. So stay tuned to your inbox for registration info on those two webinars.
01:09:20:15 - 01:09:31:29
Mike Collignon: Thanks again for joining us today. Congratulations once again to all the working moms out there, and I hope to see all of you again soon. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy and take care everyone so long.