Introduction to section 5: Embodied carbon and material scale perspectives

Moncaster, Alice; Azari, Rahman

Abstract

While buildings and neighbourhoods are bounded in place, materials are a global resource, which can be imported from across the world. An assessment of embodied impacts for a completed building design is relatively straightforward, if requiring complete and accurate data. It is worth noting that the US setting for this very-readable paper is one where buildings and components more than a century old are rare, in contrast to most of Europe for example – rather than restricting, this underlines the important fact that heritage is a contextual issue. The LCI data for the material and process inputs for each material, and the waste and pollutant outputs, are taken from EcoInvent. While its limitations and sometimes counterintuitive results suggest that it might not be a proposal that gains wide traction, it does highlight some issues which are lost through a focus on embodied greenhouse gas emissions.

Citation

Moncaster, A., & Azari, R. (2023). Introduction to section 5: Embodied carbon and material scale perspectives. In R. Azari, & A. Moncaster (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Carbon in the Built Environment (331-334). Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

• Online Publication Date: Dec 22, 2023
• Publication Date: Dec 22, 2023
• Deposit Date: Feb 2, 2024
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Pages: 331-334
• Book Title: The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Carbon in the Built Environment
• Chapter Number: 21
• ISBN: 9781032234861
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11650584