Embodied Carbon Reduction Plan Report

2

Executive Summary

Stop reading for a moment and look around you. You are no doubt surrounded by a

structure—a building with walls and glass windows and concrete, perhaps steel or wood. If

you look outside, you probably see other structures, sidewalks, and asphalt-paved streets.

Or maybe you are riding in a train car, on steel tracks, pulling into a station stop with

concrete platforms. Embodied carbon (EC) represents the greenhouse gas (GHG)

emissions associated with the full life cycle of manufactured materials, objects, and

structures in the built environment from raw material extraction, manufacturing, transport,

construction, and maintenance through end-of-life disposal. For a multistory office

building with a paved parking lot, that might include hundreds of cubic yards of concrete,

tons of asphalt, tons of steel, window assemblies, and hundreds of board feet of wood—