16 July 2024 | Crain's Chicago Business
Carbon futures: Reshaping the economic landscape
AS+GG CarbonLab’s mission to revolutionize sustainability in architecture
By Christopher Drew, PhD., CIWM, HK-BEAM
As the Director of Sustainability at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG), Dr. Christopher Drew leads the AS+GG CarbonLab. The studio develops sustainable strategies for energy efficiency, energy generation, reduction of carbon emissions, waste management, water conservation, sustainable materials selection, resilience, climate change assessment, lifecycle cost assessment and other key performance indicators for AS+GG’s projects.
AS+GG CarbonLab understands that knowledge serving to better the environment should be shared, and therefore also provides consulting services to nations, cities, governments, national advocacy groups, developers, and a variety of architectural and technology-based companies. The practice operates at the forefront of reversing the built environment’s impact on climate change by designing low, zero and negative lifecycle carbon buildings. Chris’ leadership has contributed to AS+GG achieving a building energy performance savings of 72% compared to the US national average of 45%.
With 25 years of experience as an ecologist and sustainability leader in the construction industry, Chris studies the inter-relationships between the built and natural environments and urban ecosystems. He has been instrumental in driving all AS+GGs projects to be net-zero or net-positive in terms of water and energy while reducing their embodied carbon impacts by working in depth with structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and systems engineers to move past conventionality to establish new sustainability benchmarks.
Not content with individual building performance, Chris was the lead researcher for AS+GG’s publication Residensity: A Carbon Analysis of Residential Typologies, which evaluated several residential typologies commonly found in urban centers from single-family housing to high-rise construction. The data compiled shows how the relative carbon impacts the various construction types and their implications on land use and the future of cities. In another AS+GG publication, Toward Zero Carbon: The Chicago Central Area DeCarbonization Plan, a sustainability roadmap for the Windy City, Chris demonstrated how to meet Chicago’s groundbreaking 2030 carbon reduction goals for The Loop by providing a new paradigm for thinking about energy, water, waste, mobility and urban space.
One aspect of the built environment that continually hinders the world’s low-carbon goals is the use of concrete. In 2022 alone, 4.1 billion tons of concrete was used globally. The carbon emissions, primarily from the manufacturing of Portland cement, totaled 1.6 billion tons making concrete the second most used material on earth, after water, and is used in applications that have no realistic alternative, like building foundations and bridges. Instead of replacing concrete, AS+GG CarbonLab is exploring ways to design concrete that supports a net-zero-carbon built environment. Chris said, “We all must work with cement and concrete manufacturers to decarbonize the industry, rather than assume that concrete can be replaced.”
In 2020, AS+GG CarbonLab, in collaboration with the National Ready Mix Concrete Association (NRMCA) and Ozinga Ready Mix Concrete Company, explored ways to produce concrete mixes of low-carbon, near-zero-carbon and carbon-negative concrete without changing existing construction systems. The results showed that low-carbon and even carbon-negative concrete is achievable today. By reducing the embodied carbon of the most common material in use, AS+GG CarbonLab has demonstrated that low embodied carbon concrete is achievable using currently available technology and without significant changes to construction practices.
“What limits us is not our imagination or even technology, it is our failure to see past what we have done to see what we could become,” said Chris. “We encourage those in the construction industry who would like to be part of this innovation to reach out to our team.”
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