Hey, it's Ross from reversing climate change. I wanted to let you know that we have a new podcast called carbon removal Newsroom. It's short form, its timely and it's all about carbon removal whenever we see a good news story about carbon removal or that should be about carbon removal. We're going to record a short episode about it with a rotating cast of guests. So please subscribe to carbon removal Newsroom, check it out in your podcast app of choice and thank you so much for your
support. You're listening to the reversing climate change podcast. Cast by Nori. The world's first carbon removal Marketplace, here are your hosts Ross, Kenyon and Christoph jospeh say hello and welcome to the reversing climate change podcast. I am Ross Kenyan here with Christa Chase pay again. No, producer, Paul, where are you? We need you, I'm doing this alone. I need your help. Please come back. It's nice to have a someone to watch the levels while you're doing it.
So you're not having to chat at the same time but I'm growing into this role. I think I'm doing, okay. I think you are awesome, Ross is on the levels, Ross and I were feeling a little nostalgic today because we're actually recording this podcast in the library at University of Washington, and of the many hats that Ross. Where's that Nori? One of them is librarian. That just means that when I moved up to Seattle, I brought my books in the ones that even tenuously fit. What Nori is about.
I just stuffed into our library cabinets. Yeah. But you also loaned them out and give me foul looks, if I return them a little bit sullied, that's true. Alden has a book about carbon markets and I keep keep nagging her right. So you do a good job at that. That's it for the bicker banter. I'd like to moving on, I would like to introduce, I guess it's really exciting today to have an expert in the field. Someone who knows what she's talking about.
Who can perhaps, teach us a little bit around carbon accounting, because that's what we're trying to build a business around it. It just so turns out and we get particularly excited. When thinking about opportunities, Unity is that have historically emitted carbon that can potentially play a role in storing that same carbon.
And so this episode, we'll get into a lot of the ideas around the built environment life, cycle assessments and various things that really can move the needle in addressing the total amount of carbon going into the atmosphere. So without any further Ado sitting to my left is Professor Kate Simon and she is the Department of architecture at the University of Washington and she also So has been a Founder starter of the carbon leadership forum and I'm sure we'll learn
more what that is all about. But Kate, welcome to the show. It's really great to have you on here. We like to start the show with understanding the origins of how people got to where they are today, which is sitting on the reversing climate change podcast. So how did it all get started? Oh, well, that's an interesting
question. So I am trained as an architect and structural engineer and I was The saying as such in the San Francisco Bay area and I got together with a team looking to try and build low carbon building. So, zero carbon buildings. And in that process, we started by thinking that that was Zero operating a mission. So buildings that were super energy, efficient with solar
panels. And then we started to look at how we were going to make those buildings and started to get questions about the supply chain. So how could you make a Sustainable Building? What materials were you using? Were you using concrete? Crete or steel or wood? And where does it come from? And that led me to try and understand? What is the impact of manufacturing? The materials that we use to build buildings and transporting
them around the world. And that led me to life cycle assessment, which is the accounting method to understand those impacts. I joined the University of Washington about nine years ago, as a faculty member, and started my research to try and understand and communicate that data more clearly and what I found. Is there was a lot of interesting work to both understand the data and also generate and make decisions from
that data. Yeah, we talked about this on a recent episode with Jimmy Gia clean. Tech entrepreneur up here in Seattle about drawing the system boundaries of life cycle analyses. Am I jumping the gun on my okay? To do this, you're not. Okay, is it analyses are assessment just to call you out there? Oh, life, cycle assessments? Yeah, that's an LCA. Yes. How do you draw the system boundaries we We ended up talking about this essay called I pencil.
Should we sent your way? And there's this problem of. It seems really simple to talk about how to build a pencil. There's a factory in, there's a tree that goes into it, but there's also the machines that cut down those trees. And then what about the agriculture that went to feed the people who cut down the tree? And then the machine that made the food it's like every Act of consumption is in some way participating in the entire
global economy. But if you treat an LCA like this, are you even able to functionally talk about? It does become. Possible. How do you draw these system boundaries in a way that is actually useful? That's a great question because how the system boundary is defined will impact the results. So, what do you include in your analysis and what do you exclude and life cycle? Assessment is an evolving
method. So different analyses can have different system boundaries and then, therefore, different results. So, the pencil article is great and I would encourage people to read it if they're looking for. An interesting thought expander, you know, one of the things like growing, the coffee to feed the workers versus making the manufacturing equipment. So there are standardized methods that exist. So commonly, for example, the people are assumed to exist, no matter what.
So the assumption is that even if you weren't cutting down trees, you would probably still have a cup of coffee. And so that the cup of coffee and the people themselves tend to be outside the system boundary. This is like additionality Is that the term that you end up using, or is there some other term that guy would have drunk a coffee and done some other job that had nothing to do with the
pencil would have happened? If any would have happened, anyway, contribute it to the building, right? But it can get. There are more challenging questions like should you include the impact of making the cement Kiln and divide it out over the many different years.
That the cement is made, so that one arguably should because it's the impact of making Cement. You have to make a cement Kiln but sometimes when one is conducting an LCA, there are different reasons why you might conduct an LCA.
So if the goal is to understand the global impact of cement production, one would need to include the impact of making the cement Kilns, but if the goal of doing the LCA was to compare two different cement manufacturing processes who have almost the same facility types or perhaps it's difficult to get that data. One might not include That. So the system boundary or wood products is challenging in terms of how far back into the forest. Do you include, you know, did the forest exist?
Are the forest is same as that cup of coffee or are the forests related to the Forest Products and how do you include that? We've thought a little bit about using Force products as instances of carbon removal? If you're able to sustainably harvest wood and build wooden buildings out of it, that could store carbon assuming that That force is replacing carbon that you took out of the forest but it does seem to get a little
tricky in there. I think we've been able to fully wrap our heads around probably system, boundary issues. You think that's fair to say. Yeah, I think we can be a little bit hand wavy at this moment in time because we don't have a live methodology for such a thing, but it brings to mind something that I want to attribute to Klaus lackner who I worked for for a number of years, who talked about mobilizing carbon To help and perhaps simplify some of the
carbon accounting and in lcas. So he essentially says, if you mobilize a ton of carbon, you need to put another ton of carbon away because CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and mobilizing carbon can come from, cutting down forests, it can come from burning, fossil fuels soil, erosion, whole bunch of natural processes but the point is, it's that Balancing Act and LCA is become a useful tool.
It seems to help the carbon Accounting in These various stages to say when you mobilize the carbon, can you reduce that at some form of the process? Once you've now mobilize the carbon and got that building? Are you able to track emissions that say I have this Rosy? I'd view of there's a world that actually wants to pay to put carbon away. I don't think we're there yet. We're trying to get there.
But anyway, so that helps you kind of track these things that want to reduce the carbon and then you obviously have all of these different systems boundaries. So I guess I'm kind of just garbling some words to potentially compose a question. Around the stages that things move through to build things. And I think let's talk about buildings because you're the architect and and are able to talk about that. We ultimately want to get to
that balancing act, right? And so, can you talk us through a little bit of the stages and how lcas become applicable in this context? So I'm going to start just with a building sure as opposed to buildings or even a room if you want to build. I'll just go with a building which is easier to start with. So So, there are the impact of a building, go all the way back. Start with material extraction, which is often called The Cradle.
So, extracting materials from Earth and the emissions related to extracting those materials and then manufacturing them. So there's electricity that's used and there's often chemical reactions that take place in the in the formation of new materials and then there's transportation and construction so that phase is often called the embodied. Facts are the impacts embodied in the materials of the
building. And then, there's the stages of using a building that includes operating the building. So, using electricity and water and heat, but they're also during the use phase, there's also the impacts of repairing materials and maintaining those materials and then there would be the end of life stage. So did you demolish the building? What do you do with the materials at end of life? What happens to them? Do they rot or do you reuse them?
And then, Then there is things that happen outside of the system boundary like are you of able to avoid manufacturing more steel because you recycle a lot of steel or how much carbon was sequestered in the growth of wood materials. So there are formalized lifecycle stages that are used to characterize where those impacts are. Interestingly, if you change from a building to buildings which gets to cities and infrastructure, there is a constant flow of things that are built in.
Hushed and there's the electrical grid and so I'm pointing out that it starts to get more complicated. However, it's not necessarily essential to define the full complex system to take action to improve the system. So our work at the carbon leadership forum is emphasizing increasing awareness of Architects owners and builders that the choices they make in materials matter. And identifying strategies, both from a computational perspective, the calculating the carbon but also making good
choices. So, simply speaking, you're better off reusing a building than tearing it down and building a new one that sounds sort of obvious or what if it's a really clean building or like a really, really a progressive. Excellent good Steward of its resources, building leaving tear down a bad building and build a super clean dressing. In some cases, it would be much better to just keep the old building Yes. Yes.
Okay, if we think about a lot of the impacts are in Foundation Systems and the primary structure of the system. So, if you can keep the existing structure and upgrade the insulation or the mechanical systems, you can improve the operations. That's what retrofitting is yes. So retrofitting good, and when you're building use the materials really efficiently so don't be completely driven by form. So there's some choices that you
can make about. How you build your building that uses less material and then pick lower lower carbon, or carbon sequestering materials. I find that. I mean, first of all, love the concept of let's do things that don't emit more carbon. And if that's reusing a building or repurposing, it great fully on board as a New Yorker.
We used to live in a city where there are some rather tall skyscrapers going up and I think Architects and maybe you'll present this will resonate with you some Architects. I'm sure you can think of at least one. I have quite large egos. They want to build the tallest building and they're doing it actually because that's what
people want. And so there's this kind of dirty secret is that when you build really tall buildings, that's going to release a lot of carbon and the energy that the building consumes and the various things that go into that input. So there's this pressure, I think where you say for matters but think about the carbon.
I just curious your perspective on when form is really driven by Egos and I want to live on the 120th floor and these, you know, And all the guys I mean in the next decade in New York City we're going to see a number of really tall buildings which from a life cycle. I think look pretty poor. And so I'm curious to understand some of your insight into the forces that are both retrofitting old buildings and what you're up against in some of the new gaudy buildings that
aren't all that good. Oh, you're trying to get political on me now. You little bit? Yeah. I want to if I want to get question. Yes, spicy spicy, dramatic question. Well I'm going to pull a good academic and just be kind of Neutral in my response because it all depends. So surely, it's not the best use of our resources for individual people to have multiple large homes that sit on used. So, if you're going to talk about what would be our best action, it would not be billed.
Extra homes for super wealthy people. While rest of other people are not in homes, there are studies that compare relative height and the carbon impacts of making them and then the carbon impacts of operating them and People come to position statements of the ideal density of neighborhoods related to reducing Transportation because it's also not so great to spread everybody out. Really large distances. So there's a, there's a
trade-off there. I think probably the more pressing question is the developing world and the amount of construction that's going to be happening in China India and Asia, broadly, over the next 30 years. And that construction is important from an equity perspective. Yet the consumption of material resources is significant. I'm trying to remember my direct quote, so it's something like we're going to be building the equivalent of a Manhattan every 35 days.
I'll do I'll say it, if you didn't, because Andrew Himes drop that same nugget on his episode of the pot. So we might not have the exact date. It might be 32 and it might be 37, but you'll take it up with Andrew. You guys can do.
Yeah, I went out for the next 30 Years, 30 years and those buildings need to be material efficient, but they are also a An opportunity to be carbon sinks if we can figure out how to grow aggregate cost effectively from smokestacks, then we could be sticking carbon into the concrete foundations, like the aggregate that goes into the making of concrete. Oh yeah, Aggregates just rock. Sorry, that's the technical term for rock or sand, or play extra extra dumb here today.
Yeah, no, no, it's good. Good one. So we're actually short of good rocks and sand so it might seem crazy but In place, you know, Hawaii is now importing sand and the punch line is 0. And then, punch line is if we can stick carbon in sand, just sound, like a great setup for a joke. Oh, I know, I'm not actually funny. You're just, you're seriously. I don't actually have jokes. It's the, you could pull this up beforehand. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I'm embarrassed now.
No. Ok, so Hawaii is importing sand because they can't make concrete with them. Out of saying that they have their right? They need sand and gravel of a certain quality. You that you don't want to dredge all the beaches of Hawaii to use. Yeah. Where do you get it? Where is this hand coming from? Well, I know where it's coming from here.
Their aggregate mines in Washington state and they're also aggregate that comes from British Columbia and that's like super high quality Canadian Rock super strong. How does it start storing carbon? Do they treat it in some new way or standard rock is not actively storing carbon, but there are emerging technologies that, okay? Now I'm outside my expertise, they do something so they can capture the carbon that comes
out of the smokestack. So concentrated carbon and grow, little bits of sand or direct air capture mechanisms as a potential. So imagine what looks like a giant. What I've seen looked like a giant air conditioner. Some sort that was spitting stuff out. You probably know more about this than I do. Yeah, I think that's that's Kristoff's background. He does a lot about that, that's coming at some point here. And so, you're saying that
buildings Be able to concrete. I'm not sure how much responsibility that industry has for climate change but I think it's a double-digit percentage of man-made greenhouse gases. Yes, yes, depends on which system boundary you draw and really close to 10% from cement and concrete production and cement in concrete are really useful materials. So it's a interesting trade-off. High-impact in high utility.
Sure, we wouldn't want to give up concrete, but over time, you're saying that buildings will be able to to, I don't know if they'll be able to offset the entire amount of the emissions from their concrete, or just make it go down a lot or could even become truly carbon - that's our goal. So, as a group, we used to be modest in our Ambitions and say we just want to reduce embodied carbon.
But now we want the built environment to be a carbon sink and it seems plausible just like going to the Moon to seemed plausible like hard and needs a lot of work. But plausible, yeah, we ground them. Person climate change a podcast. So we're liable to run our mouths about big goals as much as anyone. So I hope that works were very excited about Aggregates in concrete generally and we're kind of counting on you.
So yeah, keep it up. I want to go back to you mentioned the carbon leadership forum and talking about actual practical uses for lcas. So can you just give some example? I mean, I love the goal, the ambition long-term were totally aligned and on the same team. We want buildings to be net. Carbon sinks.
But they're not there yet, but LCA still have usefulness and so, can you for our listeners, kind of explain why someone might want to use an LCA today and how how they're being used, okay, in the building industry, there's really two scales of lcas that are taking place. One is at a product. So, a product specific LCA is conducted and can report the results in an environmental product declaration and CPD epds are sort of like nutrition labels in that that you can.
Any PD and have a sense of the carbon emissions for a specific product. The US Green Building Council and other Green Building programs gives credits so you can get credits if you use products with epds and that that's really about disclosure. So this is new as a practice that a manufacturer would disclose the carbon and other environmental impacts of their manufacturing, so it's not
across the industry. So at the first stage we're really needing to get towards transparency and then then there is the look towards Improvement and And so then one could conduct what's called a whole building LCA. But frankly, it's really a part of a whole building else. The a usually, so typically, people are analyzing the big hitters of the structural system, the beams, and the columns, and the exterior walls, the windows and insulation, and
things like that. It's the steel is that the big, big, harmful 10. Now, you're trying, another political comment, yeah, what kind of put you somewhere? We're going to dig yourself out what's bad about building do. It's like the big what's bad about building buildings as we use a lot of material and materials. Tend to have high impact, especially the materials that require a fair amount of energy to process. That's like that's concrete. That's steel. That's glass. That's insulation.
That's aluminum Plastics. I'm still not entirely clear what insulation is but I've been made quite itchy and my Grandma's Attic. Once you were that kid, yeah, like it's gotten. Candy is so cool. Yeah, no, that's not smart. It was was not enough. Well, I'm very glad that you did not die from that experience, so that we could record this podcast. I also am glad because I want to play this game that we are going to try out for the very first time.
It's called good LCA, bad LCA, so I'll say good LCA, and then, Kate will finish my sentence. Yeah, and what I really appreciate is that you didn't tell me this ahead of time, so it's totally totally Sighs no prep. Okay, here we go. A good LCA is one that defines the system boundary about LCA is one that doesn't tell you anything about their analysis method. Just the result, a good LCA is one that uses consistent data
about LCA is One, that declares. It's better than everybody else without being third-party reviewed. Okay. Keep the politics out of this gate. We gonna tone it down it down. Okay, you've been warned more than once. Okay. A bad LCA is one that declare why you want to do it the goal. So I want to do an LCA because I want to know what's the better solution but then you analyze something, totally different. Like I just reviewed one that I
thought was bad. So somebody was comparing the transportation distances for using different cement alternates and concrete and they highlighted the differences in ecotoxicity of transportation and ignored the differences in carbon impact of the concrete mix. So they picked what in the end is low, significant impact differences and not prioritizing High significant impacts? Yeah, that's a good. I'm not opposed to ecotoxicity. It's just that the ecotoxicity Impacts of transporting fly.
Ash is not the biggest problem on the planet. What is ecotoxicity and what exactly is that? It's a measure of the toxic emissions within the environment. I don't like that question on that that's basically it's an environmental impact category. That's not commonly used because there is not as broad of a global consensus on the relevance of the reporting to the actual change in environmental health.
Okay. I understand so people pretty much agree with lcas that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. We need to be watching for those but then there are other types of chemicals that there's more disagreement about or their importance of, so ozone, depletion super important.
However, there's been policy to reduce the ozone depleting chemical emissions and so therefore making choices based on how much ozone depleting emissions are taking place are not very relevant because they're all super small right now. Mmm. Okay, understood this is a hard game Christoph. Yeah should be ended or do you have it one more round in you? Let's let's try it. This is our final round of okay. A good LCA follows ISO standards and reports goal and scope and
information. I think I'm repeating myself but because lcas can be different based on what you include and how you analyze it. It can't be a good LCA unless you tell people how you did it. Yeah, I think if there's one take-home point you decide to store, really anyone who's making any kind of like declaration in any kind of estimation need to put your assumptions up front, so that someone else can come along and replicate that same thing. That's like the basic tenets of science.
It is yes, thank you. Yeah, so do that if you're doing LCS, that sounds good. I want to get into the various Scopes and various other things that were referenced. Or do you really want me to do about else? I think we're good. I think she's, I think she's got it. Yeah, especially since I keep repeating myself. Like if you are repeating
yourself. Also, if you're listening to this podcast it's not as easy as it sounds to be be witty and on it hunt for stuff and I constantly are putting her foot in the mouth and we listened back to them later and say oops.
So. Yeah. What could impact the the last comment a bit about the scope and well, for example, one could compare two different buildings and if you just said this building is the lowest impact building And you didn't say what was included, sometimes studies, for example, ignore the entire Foundation system. Because they don't have data on it. So if you don't have the foundation system, there's limits to what kind of conclusions you could draw.
So it looks cleaner than it might otherwise because you just don't include everything. So this seems like a real challenge. That's facing the construction industry. And part of your work has been to develop tools to help them face these challenges around standardization and creating estimations.
That take a whole look at the building, which is with the e. EC3, which is the embodied carbon construction construction calculator, the EC3 calculator, decody, call it Callie and I kind of like ISO standards where ISO is international standards organization, but you just say standards again because it's one of those things that we call it the EC3 tools. Okay. I don't quite sound.
So silly, got it, got it. Okay, and we love the EC3 tool that obviously has been a broad stakeholder development, where you have people and and to do Which are working in the construction industry have architects who can come together. I love that. It seems to State its assumptions up front so you actually know how those calculations are made. But can you talk a little bit about how the EC3 tool, addresses, some of these challenges in not full lifecycle
accounting? Yeah, so first off the EC3 tool uses LCA data. So it uses those environmental product declarations that report materials and is designed to help design construction. And owner teams differentiate between materials up the supply chain. It is not a tool at the present state that could conduct a whole building lifecycle assessment. So it's being really explicit that it's a brown product procurement.
So I know I want to buy steel or I want to buy reinforcing steel, what are my choices and how could I make those choices? So we're in the phase, one of that project. So we've got some Structural Engineers piloting it, and we're just about to start with some general contractors piloting, it, the main objective of this Project is to try to make the complexity that we're talking about simpler for design and
construction teams to act upon. So we're working with sea-change Labs, who's doing the technological development, all of the work of both user interface and data management. That's super exciting. Because that's not my area of expertise, and our job, at the University of Washington is both to facilitate the dialogue, across different industry groups, and then helped establish what that transparent
data analysis. This is, yeah, I imagine if you were in the construction industry and even if it was a big priority of yours to build buildings, in the most ecological fashion possible, the amount of information that's necessary once the scope is Broad enough is really quite challenging. I think. Even if you had the right intentions, your job might be stymied just by a lack of centralized information and it's
the world economy generally. Yeah I mean and in some ways the first step of what we're doing is quite simple and that we're collecting what data. Enabling it to be sorted and evaluating the data to assess whether or not it's comparable, and as an intermediate step. So, I mean, that that really is right now, if I'm an architect and engineer and owner, I wouldn't even know what are the possible ranges.
So, you know, what is the low-carbon concrete that one can get in Seattle for Architects on? Go back to Kristoff's comment about the desire to build bigger and bigger buildings, and I don't know, too many Architects. I'm just if your ego is bruised, by us saying, your ego is Big. Very sorry. You can write to us, will issue a formal apology to the international Society of Architects for whatever Professional Standards body thing is? Yeah, is there a tendency or a
race? I would imagine if I Was An Architect, these days, I would be trying to build the cleanest most environmental building possible. I'm sure. You know, just the size of the building is no longer the main metric that people are rushing for. They also wanted to be Peter and being environmentally sound. Is that a trend? That's happening. So, I have two different responses that I want to give to you. So first, I'll talk about the trend within the architecture
and engineering professions. So there is a noticeable trend of understanding, the interconnected complexities of the environmental impact of building from operating and building them. The Pacific Northwest is sort of known as a hub of embodied carbon, but I would extend that all the way to the West. So the West Ghost. There is a lot of understanding and interest around that. I'm going to go back a little bit to the ego because it is not
just the ego of the architect. And in fact, the architect in many cases in almost all cases is hired by somebody else. And so the choice of an egotistical architect is usually linked to the choice of an egotistical client. The clients are the ones that make the primary Direction and decision-making like a giant real estate magnate naming no names. I don't know.
He won after no no no we and but you know and companies have desires to make buildings that are notable and stunning that might not be just about ego per se. So one of the interesting issues is to figure out what are the no-cost options. The best practices that one can Implement within any type of building from a low-income housing to a high-rise Towers. So that you know, there are some fundamental Apple's about getting 20 operating energy. All of our buildings, should be there by 2030.
All of our new buildings, and we need to figure out Pathways. So, all of our buildings can get to zero, carbon by 2050, if I wanted to show off to my neighbors and I had enough money to buy a house and got enough money to build a house. I think if I wanted to show off the best way to do, it would be make one of these houses. That is, is living. It has a green roof on it. It's maximizes. Take advantage of the sun has to have house passive. - yes.
Is that the best way to show off if you're rich and you want to show that you care. So, if I'm talking to the rich people showing they want to care that are in your audience. Is that sort of what I'm hearing? You say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me some advice. Yeah. And let me in the future. When I want to do this. Well, you know, yes, you should be making plans to do that. So you probably in the future we'll be doing that.
So you or any person who owns large amounts of real estate, it might be difficult to radically change what you're doing today but you should be having a strategy Gigi and plan of how that's going to be implemented over time. But keep in mind, listeners, that you need to make sure that you could, you just stay in the house that you're in. Now, it might be worse to build that passive house in my learning, it might actually be if I might actually be better.
So it's, you know, if you're going to tear down the house at one location, you're probably better off retrofitting. It and adding solar panels at some point though is there enough and maybe appreciating your 1995 kitchen, Or putting carbon storing counters in which don't exist. Quite yet, know that I'd like marble and granite. No one has figured out some other material for that. Yeah, I give something more important to say than countertops. Probably know.
I like the guests to sort of prime the questions they want to be asked, and I think you're going there a little bit Kate. When you say carbon sequestering materials in buildings or the built environment, so, talk to us a little bit. About that. What are some of the challenges and opportunities for storing carbon in the built environment? And maybe just we can start with the countertop but I'm sure
there's more yes. Okay. So the opportunity is huge, there's a large mass of materials that are used in buildings. So if you think of carbon just as a chemical that has mass that we need to stick in things if we can figure out how to make useful materials from that carbon, there's a lot of opportunity, you know, not just the structural system but the table that We've got here Furniture, the Furnishings all
along. So there are manufacturers that are setting targets to having carbon neutral products. Interface carpet is one that they've got a plans of figuring out how they can sequester materials reuse, materials reduce the carbon intensity of their energy sources. So there are conventional materials like carpet and then there are new materials that might be a new use of carbon
fiber, right? That once we figured out how to do that in a cost-effective way, we might be having carbon Our tables with buildings that are bigger than single-family homes. I've seen there's some pretty big buildings in Seattle that use wood as their structure. Yes, they're beautiful. Something, the the beams are exposed and they're, they're really lovely more so than if it was just an exposed steel beam.
If you're in some cool Warehouse e kind of space, like many of the co-working spaces that I've been in, has have those kind of things? Why is that coming back? Why is would as a structural support? Now either allowed was a disallowed did steal just steal the show for a while. And now, what is back what's happening? That could be a whole podcast in itself is it is just opposite juicy topic. We should just a cross laminated Timber podcast.
So some of it has to do with new manufacturing, techniques making large pieces of wood out of smaller pieces. Some of that is a renewed interest in the material. So enthused people who feel that, it's beautiful and want to build with it. There have been recent changes to the building code which allow people to build taller buildings out of wood. There was a lot of debate about that. Can catch fire easier than steel and concrete, although steel and concrete also have issues with
fire. So you have to fireproof steel and and concrete also. So it is in some ways. It's a trend that construction Crews have expertise in different methods. So if you look at some of the old buildings in Seattle, they're all built out of heavy Timber, big large pieces of wood, partly because that was
what was available. We had big trees and lots of people who knew how to build out of wood and at that point in time, you had to ship Up the steel and the concrete in from Chicago or the East Coast. So at that time we had a Workforce that and material resources. That was all wood. There's a lot of potential for sustainably managed forests to use wood as a carbon storing material. But you also have to use wood efficiently in order for it to be the best use of the material.
So carbon is stored in wood but carbon is also emitted in manufacturing wood. And so using more wood in Building is not the best solution, even though, more carbon would be stored in that building because you're better off using that more wood and building more buildings. I'm sorry. I'm so you have a meal ticket forever because it sounds like this L. See a game is quite difficult. There's a lot of nuance involves sounds like this EC3 tool has future uses to help identify
that exact quandary. Yes. And then really, and then interestingly going up then all into the supply chain of forests and then you start to get to some of I think what would probably be the The issues that you would be talking about is, how does Forest management play out in a benefit as a carbon benefit or not and how do Forest Products be able to recognize that Forest management benefit?
One of the really interesting challenges is that products like a two-by-four tend to be graded, just on its strength, not on the carbon benefit of the whole supply chain. Yeah, speaking of forest management. I know this podcast will air sometime in the winter, which is not Fire season. Weird to say that. We now have fire season, but that's a bang. But one of my favorite ideas I heard about Forest management was actually the harvesting of wood that is at risk of burning
or maybe already dead. And basically converting that into biochar and turning that biochar into a solid material that could be carbon that somehow ends up in the built environment. Any reactions to that idea? I haven't heard that one, but that's interesting. Somebody also just recently pointed out that the forest Fires, end up, making that biochar and then the wood hangs
out in the forest for a while. The state of Washington owns a lot of and manages a lot of the forests and if the state can figure out ways to help manage the forests well and get building Wood Products out of it, that would be a good win-win right? Can we reduce fires, help our air quality manage force and buildings for carbon.
That would be great. So good potential and heard that one, that sounds pretty You're saying though we should start wrapping it up. Is there anything else we should cover? We certainly have covered a lot of ground. I guess to put a question your way K. If someone wants to get more involved in the LCA space or start thinking about carbon and buildings where should they begin?
Probably the best place would be to join the embodied carbon Network. So the embodied carbon network is supported by the carbon leadership Forum but it's an open access. Access communication Community. Now we've got about 300 people from around the world. These would be the embodied carbon nerds, I'll call them us. I'll call us all nerds and body carbon aficionados and it's a place where people are sharing news and asking questions.
So it would also we also create our own series of webinars around embodied carbon in the built environment. It's a place where people are. If you ask a question within 24 hours, you get a bunch of people answering giving you different answers. The question that would be the first place I would go, and then The carbon leadership Forum does have some resources online and there's some other other organizations architecture 2030 has a carbon smart material
palette. Cool. Yeah, I think you may have just forced our hand and Nori is going to join that Network. That sounds like an amazing Community. Yeah. And so hopefully maybe some of our listeners will want to join and we'll see you in there as well. Yes, thanks for being with us, Kate. And then we recently sent out via the Nori newsletter podcast
survey. And we heard that People very much wanted, an outro, sometimes we end abruptly, so, I'm going to keep talking and then gradually Fade Out.