This course is part of the Metal Architecture Academy

Other Programs for Material Health and Transparency

The GREENGUARD certification program, administered by UL Environment, screens for over 360 volatile organic compounds (VOC) and total chemical emissions, ensuring that certified products are not harmful to building occupants and do not adversely impact indoor environment quality (IEQ). GREENGUARD is a third-party certification demonstrating that products are healthy and safe for the human environment.

The C2C Certified Material Health Certificate uses the material health assessment methodology of the Cradle to Cradle Certified Product Standard to provide manufacturers a trusted way to communicate their work towards chemically optimized products. North American IMP manufacturers created a first-of-its-kind cradle-to-grave UL Certified ISO compliant EPD in September of 2011. Since that time, the manufacturing group has issued multiple revisions to document the journey of continuous product improvement. Current leading manufacturer IMP EPDs are certified by SCS Global Services, an international leader in third-party certification and standards development in environmental, sustainability, food safety, and quality performance claims.

Transparency For Credibility

Transparency through independent third-party certification gives design and building professionals confidence that the products they use are the right fit to support both their project and environmental goals. Excellent tools exist in the marketplace to facilitate material comparison through quickly quantifying embodied carbon impacts and LCA.

Available LCA Tools

Beacon is a free Revit plug-in, developed by Thornton Tomasseti, that is primarily focused on structural systems. It provides quick, high-level feedback and clear data visualization of a proposed structural system's embodied carbon performance. Beacon converts Revit element volume and material density to an embodied carbon value based on a user specified GWP coefficient. Beacon calculates embodied carbon for the following Revit Categories: structural framing, structural columns, structural foundation, floors, and walls. The total embodied carbon per square meter of floor area is measured against median values for various building categories: Commercial, Residential, Education, Healthcare, Lodging, Mixed, and Other. The structure is rated red, yellow, or green. Median values come from data provided to the Carbon Leadership Forum since 2012 for the Embodied Carbon Benchmark Study.

Photo courtesy of Kingspan Insulated Panels

The primary aim of LCA tools is to compare wall envelopes and quantify the environmental impacts of wall system selection. 1611 West Division, Chicago.

Athena, from The Athena Institute, offers the only LCA-based tools in North America for whole buildings and assemblies. It generates a separate model of the project and is especially useful for transportation projects. Athena has the most in-depth, complete, and robust LCA databases for North American construction materials. Existing data is periodically replaced as it ages to reflect changes in manufacturing processes.

EC3 is a free Revit plug-in by the Building Transparency Group, which focuses on construction documents and construction optimization. The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool is free and easy to use. It allows benchmarking, assessment, and reductions in embodied carbon, focused on the upfront supply chain emissions of construction materials. The EC3 tool uses building material quantities from construction estimates and BIM models, as well as a robust database of digital, third-party verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). EC3 can be integrated with both the design and procurement phases of a construction project to look at a project’s overall embodied carbon emissions, enabling the specification and procurement of the low carbon options. The EC3 tool also allows owners, green building certification programs, and policymakers to assess supply chain data in order to create EPD requirements and set embodied carbon limits and reductions at the construction material and project scale.

Kaleidoscope is a tool designed to supplement, not replace, whole-building LCA in early design phases. It is meant to be a reference for order of magnitude in early LCA decisions, allowing designers to quickly compare the embodied carbon impacts of various standard building systems and design options.

Using Tools to Compare Materials

Using tools to make material decisions means the application must be able to compare typical industry building systems in an apples-to-apples manner by using the same module and system boundary for each building system. While energy use associated with building operations can be reduced over time with measures such as energy efficiency retrofits, shifts towards renewable energy procurement, and onsite renewable energy installations, embodied carbon from building materials and construction are unchangeable once a building is constructed. This locked-in nature of embodied carbon means that the opportunity for architects and building owners to reduce the carbon footprint of a building, as it relates to building materials, therefore, is limited to the design and procurement phases of a project. This clearly underscores the critical importance of thoughtful material selection and detailed specifications at the outset.

Using Tally to generate an analysis, four different wall assemblies can be applied to the same building design, a typical warehouse structure, to demonstrate and quantify the embodied environmental impacts of material selection, calculated using whole-building life-cycle assessment (LCA). The selected building is a 150,000-square-foot warehouse in Philadelphia with the environmental impacts of structure, envelope, and interior assemblies over a 60-year building life determined. The analysis accounts for the full cradle-to-grave life cycle of the whole building for each of the four options studied across all life-cycle stages. The stages include material manufacturing, maintenance and replacement, and eventual end of life. Each option meets the performance criteria defined by the International Building Code. Equivalent energy performance is proxied by maintaining a wall R-value of 20, as required for climate zone 4A. All buildings meet structural requirements for typical Philadelphia conditions, with structural modifications per option to support the envelope as well as regionally appropriate loads for snow and wind.

The four wall systems compared include an insulated metal panel (IMP) system insulated with a proprietary hybrid, self-blended microcell insulation core produced by one specific global manufacturer, an IMP insulated with mineral fiber, insulated concrete, and tilt-up concrete. Each building design shares several common elements across the four buildings but varies per the requirements of each wall system in areas such as structural members and associated foundations.

While the shared elements accounted for the vast majority of the mass of the buildings, the primary aim of this study was to compare wall envelopes and quantify the environmental impacts of wall system selection.

Tally generated the figures for potential environmental impacts and resource demand over the full building life cycle based on the TRACI 2.1 Characterization Scheme, including Global Warming, Acidification, Eutrophication, Smog Formation, Ozone Depletion, and Non-Renewable Energy Demand. The LCAs revealed that the wall system using IMPs insulated with the proprietary hybrid fill from the global manufacturer had the lowest embodied carbon levels, represented as global warming potential (GWP), out of all the systems compared─28 percent lower than both the insulated concrete and tilt-up concrete walls, which had the highest levels of embodied carbon. The proprietary hybrid insulated IMP wall also had the lowest impact on smog formation─19 percent lower than the highest impact design which used tilt-up concrete wall, again followed closely by the insulated concrete wall.

In assessing non-renewable energy demand, the mineral fiber IMP wall had the highest impact, with the proprietary IMP hybrid insulation wall using 13 percent less non-renewable energy.

The study reveals that for design teams and building owners seeking to reduce the embodied carbon of building envelopes in industrial buildings to the highest degree possible, new analysis tools provide vital information for selecting the best materials that offer the most effective solution.

Conclusion

Future-oriented buildings require future-oriented products. Future-proofing means designing a building to not only meet today’s code criteria, but also to create a structure that will satisfy the environmental demands of the future. The innovations of IMP materials allow architects to design and send a building into the future with confidence. IMPs are a fit for all climate zones and interior conditions, with the ability to provide all necessary building control layers as a single component without the use of supplemental systems. IMPs are also easily integrated with other wall and roof systems by connecting control layers. Their aesthetic range means design flexibility; ease of installation helps both initial costs and guarantees preservation of a building enclosure’s performance.