Environmental experts say the construction industry accounts for more than one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are now trying to make the industry more sustainable.
Kara Peterman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMass, said emissions are released at every stage of the construction process — especially when using steel.
"That could begin with the mining of iron ore, or it can begin with recycled scrap material, which is how a lot of steel in the U.S. starts off," Peterman said. "Then all the refining and all of the work required to make it into a quality structural product goes into that process and uses up a lot of energy and thus a lot of carbon.
Currently, Peterman said, it’s cumbersome and expensive to gather data on that carbon use. So her team at UMass got a $6.4 million federal grant — part of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act — to help gather and standardize the data, and offer it for free, with the help of steel industry groups.
That would allow a builder to say "this material has expended this much carbon in its manufacture, and I'm trying to hit a certain sustainability or energy use target for my building. And so I might use this other material instead," Peterman said. "So it allows the engineer, the designer or the architect to be that much more informed when they're actually designing and building a structure.”
And since there is no law requiring builders to take sustainability into account, creating data reports known as an "environmental product declaration (EDP)" is voluntary.
“Companies who have felt strongly about creating them have done so. And the larger companies who have lots of resources have done that," she said. "But the smaller manufacturers, without as many resources, haven't previously had the incentive to dedicate... time and money to it.”
Peterman hopes her team’s work will remove most of the financial barriers, and she said there will also be a training and educational component, so that builders will understand the importance of sustainable materials and know how to use the data. The work begins this fall.