In our first article, we urged a new level of innovation in leadership and
management to meet sustainability goals. Such innovation will be required in order to achieve your 2030 sustainability goals.
As a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO), Chief Operations Officer
(COO) or Chief Financial Officer (CFO), you should expect
significant contributions from your enterprise team of real estate, properties
and facilities who manage your built environment footprint. These expectations
shouldn’t be less ambitious than your overall 2030 sustainability goals.
Achieving them, however, will require a shared mindset of regenerative
design.
In this second article, we encourage CSOs, COOs and CFOs of leading brands to
challenge built environment teams to set targets for achieving net-positive
impacts,
net-zero
energy
and zero waste in this decade.
Net-positive impacts
What do we mean by net-positive impacts? In addition to the built environment
doing less harm, it can also do better by actually benefiting the ecosystem
services that we rely
upon.
What are ecosystem services? Tamanna Kalam, writing for ScienceABC,
provides this
definition:
Circularity by Design: How to Influence Sustainable Consumer Behaviors
Join us Thursday, December 5, at 1pm ET for a free webinar on making circular behaviors the easy choice! Nudge & behavioral design expert Sille Krukow will explore the power of Consumer Behavior Design to drive circular decision-making and encourage behaviors including recycling and using take-back services. She will share key insights on consumer psychology, behavior design related to in-store and on-pack experiences, and how small changes in the environment can help make it easy for consumers to choose circularity.
“Ecosystem
services
are all the processes and outputs that nature provides us with. These include
provisioning services (food, water), regulating services (waste water treatment,
pollution control), supporting services (shelter), and cultural services
(recreation and tourism).”
The built environment can impact ecosystem services in many ways. For example,
are the wood materials in your building projects contributing to deforestation,
thereby reducing the natural ability of forests to provide ecosystem services?
Are construction materials sourced
responsibly,
according to industry council standards? Better yet, are there opportunities to
substitute reclaimed wood materials to minimize the need for original raw
materials? Taking this a step further, can engineered wood products, such as
cross-laminated timber, be
substituted for structural steel framing as a strategy for reducing total
embodied carbon? These questions require the analysis of trade-offs in terms of
circular value cycles, not linear life-cycle cost models — the latter do not
account for natural
capital.
Alternative solutions can have negative or positive net impacts on ecosystem
services that support human wellbeing and planetary health.
Net-zero energy
Net-zero energy is achieved when the total annual energy consumed to operate a
building, or a collection of buildings, equals the same amount which is
generated onsite or offsite from renewable sources (such as wind or solar).
Net-zero energy is an operational measure and does not account for embodied
carbon as may be the case in achieving net-positive impacts to ecosystem
services. Net-zero energy pertains mostly to reducing greenhouse gas emissions
related to building operations and sources of energy. Since building operations
account for 28 percent of global CO2 emissions, reducing or eliminating GHG
emissions in the built environment sector should be a major efficiency
initiative for existing building operations. And, net-zero energy is gradually
becoming the new standard for new building construction.
Net-zero carbon
There is an unfortunately confusing aspect to “net zero” terminology. Whereas
net-positive energy is a good thing and signifies a situation in which a
building contributes more energy to the grid than it takes, net-positive carbon
is a bad thing — it indicates that a building contributes more greenhouse gas
emissions than zero. Net-negative carbon is the ultimate goal of regenerative
design. In such a scenario, a building would absorb or sequester more carbon
that it
releases.
Zero waste
There is no such thing as waste in living ecosystems. In the natural world,
waste from one organism becomes food for another organism. An ecological systems
approach is the foundation of regenerative design. Such an approach aims to
restore, renew and revitalize all energy sources and material flows in ways that
mimic natural systems. Such a biomimetic
approach
is regenerative by nature. While “sustainable” solutions may continue to rely
upon the efficient use of energy from fossil fuels, regenerative solutions rely
upon renewable energy sources. And, while “sustainable” solutions may also rely
upon the continued extraction of natural resources as raw material inputs,
regenerative solutions keep materials in use longer and recover their value at
an end-of-life stage — when waste becomes a next-stage input, rather than a
by-product.
Regenerative design shifts thinking beyond sustainability toward circularity,
from a linear supply chain model to a circular value cycle model — from a return
on investment analysis based on life-cycle costing to value cycles in which
materials maintain their value in closed-loop systems. Moving toward circularity
in the built environment considers net-zero energy and zero waste of materials
in
construction,
and later during deconstruction and ease of disassembly of buildings by design.
Next in this series, we will explore strategies for reducing operating and
embodied carbon in the built environment.
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Published Nov 11, 2020 7am EST / 4am PST / 12pm GMT / 1pm CET