Accelerating the Adoption of Low Embodied Carbon Materials

What is the future of life cycle assessments (LCA)? What is the climate impact of storing carbon in the built environment for decades? What does it mean to transform the built environment to a living carbon sink, and what strategies will get us there? This session will showcase the cutting-edge of embodied carbon analysis, including dynamic LCA, biogenic carbon storage, and the opportunity to quantify and store carbon in buildings. Speakers will provide examples of de-risking innovative natural materials and showcase why natural materials have the potential to disrupt common ideas about conventional products. Expert panelists will examine where the industry is moving in regard to LCA, addressing historical data gaps, dealing with biogenic materials, and shifting trends towards regenerative strategies.

While the design and construction industries race to find innovation from new materials that cut carbon and provide multiple benefits, what about traditional building materials? This session will showcase forward-thinking embodied carbon innovation in the steel, concrete and wood industries. Ranging from direct component reuse, wood sourcing, and the next generation of concrete and steel, attendees will walk away with knowledge in how to push the materials of their next project towards regenerative practices. Panelists will share workflows for implementing next generation practices with the “big three” and reflect on how each industry is pushing the envelope on traditional materials.

This rapid-fire session will showcase how the newest digital workflow tools will accelerate impact while reducing pain points in the selection of sustainable building products. This session brings together innovative product data platforms and thought leaders to demonstrate how digital tools are rising to the challenge of a new digital future for product selection. Speakers will demonstrate how digital tools support product reviews, simplify documentation, and automate reporting. Leading software platforms will reveal how project teams can easily prioritize higher-performing products across climate health, human health, ecosystem health, social health and equity, and circularity.

Building and material reuse holds immense potential to cut carbon emissions and minimize impacts compared to new materials. In today’s green building industry, prominent success stories and rapidly advancing quantification tools are demonstrating the full value of materials reuse like never before. It feels like the industry is poised for great change that will lead to the scaling-up of material reuse on more projects in more areas.

In this session, panelists will share case studies, best practices, and takeaways from scaling-up reuse on real projects. Following the inspirational presentations, the audience will transition into a guided interactive workshop where participants will learn to identify challenges and overcome obstacles to scale reuse in their home regions. This session will leave you with a new appreciation of the potential of reuse to meet carbon and other environmental goals, and empower you with a toolkit to take action.

Realizing the circular economy for building materials remains challenging for most materials, but widespread advocacy and engagement by every actor in the materials ecosystem can unlock rapid change.

This session will illustrate why the time is right for bold actions to catalyze circularity at scale. Inspiring panelists will share how they are leveraging their position as owners, designers, contractors, policy makers, manufacturers, remanufacturers, and advocates to advance change in real-time. Experts will address the business and social value case for circular construction, manufacturer efforts to create circular materials and buyback programs, and how regional actions are coalescing into shared knowledge and application.

Industry leaders will share exciting updates and initiatives to encourage and/or require cutting embodied carbon and improving the environmental footprint of building materials. Leaders will share recent advances and upcoming solutions that offer rewards (the “carrot”) or set requirements (the “stick”) to transform supply chains, design strategies, and construction practices for the better.

This session will showcase leading policymakers, companies, NGOs, and everything in-between! Be inspired and walk away with the knowledge to drive change and move towards a healthy, circular, and low-embodied carbon material economy.

One year ago at Greenbuild, the world’s leading green building organizations announced their intention to harmonize how sustainable building products and materials are assessed. In the memorandum of understanding penned to announce the harmonization effort last year, global green building rating systems pledged to adopt a common language, align data and metrics, and establish global targets for climate, nature, and circularity. In this closing session for the Summit, representatives of the global materials alignment group will discuss progress and results of the first year of action. Representatives of the British Research Establishment (BRE), the Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA), mindful MATERIALS, Living Future, the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) will share lessons learned from the first year of alignment and engage with the audience on what comes next.