The impact of embodied carbon in the built environment has been difficult to assess, due to a lack of data. To address that knowledge gap, Ming Hu, the associate dean for research, scholarship and creative work in Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, and Siavash Ghorbany, a Notre Dame graduate student in civil and environmental engineering, have created a new tool to analyze the embodied carbon in more than 1 million buildings in Chicago. Their recently published research identifies 157 different architectural housing types in the city and provides the first ever visual analysis tool to evaluate embodied carbon at a granular level and to help inform policymakers seeking to strategically plan for urban carbon mitigation.
Tag: Green Building
UC Irvine teams ranked high in Orange County Sustainability Decathlon results
Irvine, Calif., Oct. 17, 2023 — TeamMADE, a sustainable home design and construction crew with student members from the University of California, Irvine and Orange Coast College, placed second overall in the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon, which was held Oct.
NUS Engineers Repurpose Excavation Waste to Produce Greener, Stronger Concrete
NUS researchers have taken a waste product from construction sites in Singapore and upcycled it into a raw material for ultra-high-performance concrete. Their method could help reduce the carbon footprint of concrete and also cut the cost of production. This is the first time low-grade waste clay has been used as fillers in concrete.
NUS engineers make smart plugs smarter
Researchers from NUS Engineering have developed a new electrical socket system that can manage the energy consumption of an entire building in real-time. This invention has the potential to optimise energy use on a large scale, and advance Singapore’s Smart Nation agenda.
Building cities with wood would store half of cement industry’s current carbon emissions
Shifting to wood as a building construction material would significantly reduce the environmental impact of building construction. If 80% of new residential buildings in Europe were made of wood inside and out, they would store the equivalent of about half of the cement industry’s annual emissions.