Why Embodied Carbon Requires a Translation Layer (2024)

Illustration: Anneli Tostar

In the world of construction, different stakeholders have historically been trained in different tools, methods, and types of analysis. The long chain of decision-making is cut up into tidily organized information. A contractor is responsible for their portion of the project, an architect for theirs, and so on. There is no crossing of streams, so to speak.

Because each stakeholder has such a unique workflow and set of tools, the result is that they literally see buildings differently.

When a commercial real estate developer sees a building, this is what they see:

An example real estate development pro forma. Source: PropertyMetrics.

When an architect sees a building, this is what they see:

Every building looks good as a rendering. Source: Gravity Architecture.

When a general contractor sees a building, this is what they see:

An example construction drawing. Believe it or not, all of these numbers and letters mean something. Source: Advenser.

When a manufacturer sees a building, this is what they see:

The level of detail in a building product spec sheet can boggle the mind. Most of these live on outdated manufacturer websites or on the shelves of architecture studios. Source: CertainTeed

And when an institutional investor sees a building, this is what they see:

Source: Nareit

To those of us in the industry, this may seem perfectly normal. After all, there are so many tasks that go into developing a building, and there’s certainly liability in not performing those tasks as expected. Dabbling in someone else’s line of sight has consequences.

But to the layperson, this is kind of nuts. And now, it’s a problem. Sustainability requires collaboration, because sustainability is fundamentally about data. If the data about a building is unusable by other stakeholders, we cannot collaborate. And without this transparency and collaboration, we have no idea how sustainable our buildings are.

Institutional investors (and the climate, for that matter) don’t care if you don’t use the same software tools as your counterpart. They don’t have time to listen to excuses about how so-and-so didn’t organize their Revit files properly. (You know who you are…) They care about the numbers. The data. The carbon impact.

This is especially a problem for embodied carbon (carbon associated with building materials & construction). Operational carbon (associated with building energy usage) certainly has its challenges, particularly in the case of triple net leases where tenants have full control over their utilities. That said, the variance in what this data actually looks like, and others’ abilities to read this data, is a lot less extreme. Reading a utility bill isn’t rocket science, whereas it actually requires training to read construction drawings and understand what the walls are composed of.

So, what’s an industry to do? How do we get this complex chain of silos to talk to each other? The good news is that we live in an age of technology. We at Tangible, and many other companies across the industry, are working to solve the “translation issue” by developing technology that allows even the most technical information to be easily extracted and interpreted by those with minimal knowledge of embodied carbon.

If we are to actually move forward as an industry, we need all stakeholders to be onboard. We need real estate owners to be able to communicate with their architects, even if they don’t have an architecture degree. We need information to be easily accessible and interpretable so that we can spend time on what matters: actually taking action.

If you’re curious what this ‘translation layer’ looks like, get in touch.