In this article, we will see how new buildings work to nurture a warming planet, and how the wall and ceiling industry can be a part of this new wave of sustainability.
Sustainability. We hear so much about it, and multiple products and building materials claiming to be sustainable, but what is it, really? The 1987 Brundtland Commission of the United Nations defines sustainability as, “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” What may be more important to the wall and ceiling industry is sustainable development, which has a similar definition: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This sounds simple, but implementation is difficult.
Our world needs to build to meet our current and future needs. Population is expected to rise to 9.7 billion by 2050. More families are moving to cities, where buildings will need to rise vertically to handle this onslaught of people. In addition, there are climate refugees and revolutions, as people move from areas where changes in weather patterns no longer allow the land to sustain crops and commerce as it has for centuries. The lack of sustainable economies has led to social unrest and mass migration: not only to North America, but to Europe from north Africa and the Middle East.
Sustainable development is a necessary tenet of modern construction. Owners, architects and engineers have explored several strategies that will allow construction and continued economic growth with reduced and eventually zero impacts on the planet. Some of these strategies hold the promise of having positive impacts on life and the environment: giving back more energy, clean water and resources than what they use in construction, use and maintenance.
This is no longer a dream, but becoming a reality as cutting-edge technologies move into the construction industry; projects such as the Bullitt Center in Seattle and the Kendeda Building at Georgia Tech showcase how this is done. In this article, we will see how some of these new buildings work to nurture a warming planet, and how the wall and ceiling industry can be a part of this new wave of sustainability.
Life-Cycle Assessment
The way in which scientists and practitioners measure the impacts of any project on the earth is through a process called life-cycle assessment (LCA). LCA looks at all impacts of creating a structure: from the extraction of the raw materials, the transport of these materials to the manufacturing facility, the making of construction products, the energy it takes to make these products and the waste from the manufacturing process, to the final products that are used for the construction of the project. But this is not the end of the LCA story: this is only the beginning.
Once the building is built, it is occupied and maintained, and this maintenance and occupancy uses resources—energy, water, fresh air and other materials as building systems are repaired, replaced, cleaned and refurbished. Once a building reaches obsolescence, it must be demolished or dismantled, and the pieces must be disposed of or reused. This represents the entire life cycle of the building, and to do a full building LCA, building science professionals and engineers need to make some assumptions about the resources used, the operation and maintenance and the use and eventual demolition.
How long will the building be used? And when the building is demolished or dismantled, what will happen to the parts and pieces? Will they be reused in other buildings, or recycled into new products, or disposed in a landfill, or burned, possibly for energy recovery?
Before a building is built, the LCA developer will have to make assumptions about what may happen in 50 to 100 years, and if they are comparing systems, these assumptions will need to be based on similar criteria for all building products they evaluate.
Product Category Rules Environmental Product Declarations
Developing an LCA is not simple, and although there are software products out there to help building scientists, there are still lots of variables and assumptions that will have to be made. A slight change in assumptions can make one product or system look much more appealing than others.
To foster standardization in LCA development and help make apples-to-apples comparisons, most construction product types have developed what are called Product Category Rules, or PCRs. These rules define some of the assumptions that will need to be made for a specific category of products, for example for gypsum panel products or steel studs. From these PCRs, manufacturers can then have third-party evaluators develop a document that quantifies the environmental impacts the manufacture of their product will have. Since manufacturers sell products into a variety of projects and sometimes a variety of industries, they cannot do a full LCA on their products: they have no control of what will happen to that product after it leaves their manufacturing facility. So, this environmental impact statement will only go from the extraction of the raw materials to the product that leaves the factory—often called a “cradle-to-gate” product analysis. Product analyses that are developed using PCRs are called EPDs—environmental product declarations.
Owners and developers concerned about climate change want to know what the impact will be of their building on the climate. This is usually measured by the amount of carbon dioxide that will be released in the construction, use and demolition of their building. Although most of the carbon impacts will come from the energy used by building occupants, immediate impacts come from the extraction, manufacture and installation of building materials.
The CO2 released from the making of these materials is called embodied carbon and is often evaluated separately from the operational carbon that is emitted during the use of the building. You may have heard numbers where global warming potential, or GWP, is expressed in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (Kg CO2 eq) per unit weight or unit volume of product produced. The reason why “eq” is included is there are several other classes of emissions, such as methane and hydrofluorocarbons, that have even higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Rather than reporting these numbers separately, emissions of these gasses are converted to Kg CO2 eq for easier comparison.
Although much has been said about embodied carbon and global warming potential of product manufacture, this is only one of up to 16 categories that are included in EPDs. However, with many owners concerned about what has been referred to as a climate emergency, the most discussed and (on many projects) the most important number in an EPD is the GWP of the manufactured product.
Wall and ceiling contractors are likely familiar with EPDs, since many of their projects have been requiring EPDs for years. But what is new in North America is owners and architects are not only requiring EPDs, but they are requiring environmental impacts that fall below a certain threshold level. For example, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided $3.375 billion to the General Services Administration (GSA) for the procurement of low embodied carbon construction materials. To reach this goal, the GSA has set benchmark requirements for four classes of products: concrete, steel, asphalt, and glass.
Right now, it is difficult for practitioners to do an apples-to-apples comparison of EPDs. Even simplifying this to just one impact, GWP, different classes of products have different values for the impact. As mentioned earlier, the most common value for GWP is kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent (Kg CO2 eq) per unit weight or unit volume of product produced. Most steel EPDs list this value as Kg CO2 eq per metric ton, while wood products list GWP as Kg CO2 eq per cubic meter. There are also different life cycle stages of impacts: and several Product Category Rules allow their EPDs to not report all impacts from some of these stages.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently announced $160 million in grants for development of low embodied carbon construction materials. The criteria of these grants are to improve EPDs by making them more comprehensive and more transparent. Part of this funding will go to development of better product category rules, and to improved software platforms that will make EPD development and evaluation easier for manufacturers and practitioners. This is intended to close the loopholes in some of the EPDs, and make it easier for apples-to-apples comparison of EPDs on the same project.
Integration in the Wall and Ceiling Industry
For wall and ceiling contractors, these tools will likely not impact projects for many months and years, but product manufacturers are already touting improved EPDs, and even creating manufacturing plant-specific EPDs in areas with more stringent regulations. In addition, owners and architects are beginning to understand that building reuse has a much lower environmental impact than a total rebuild. This bodes well for wall and ceiling contractors, since a renovation almost always includes redo of the wall and ceiling components of the building. Re-skinning the exteriors of existing buildings not only makes them look brand new but provides better insulation and better sealing against air and moisture infiltration. Because owners want construction downtime to be as little as possible, pre-finished panelized construction is becoming the go-to method for this type of building retrofit.
The materials used in wall and ceiling construction already have a compelling environmental story. Steel and gypsum, the two primary elements of commercial partition construction and retrofit, have already made great strides in reducing their environmental impact. All North American gypsum producers have drastically increased their recycled content, sourced cleaner materials and made it easier for their products to be recovered and recycled.
The Gypsum Association is working closely with the Construction and Demolition Recycling Association on initiatives and incentives for product recovery during both construction and deconstruction. For steel, by specifying equivalent studs, architects can immediately reduce product weight and therefore product environmental impacts by 30%. Coil producers have drastically reduced the amount of energy and manpower needed for steelmaking, and in many cases have switched to electricity from renewable resources.
Technology for the conversion of iron ore into new steel using hydrogen instead of carbon is already being used in one Scandinavian steel factory, and many North American steelmakers are now using electric arc furnaces, which have a much higher percentage of recycled steel. The Steel Framing Industry Association (SFIA) just created a task force to reduce their embodied carbon, and is exploring options for steel reuse.
In discussing this article with wall and ceiling contractors, I found that the focus has moved toward constructing buildings that are healthier for occupants. Owners and architects have realized that there are measurable gains in productivity if their employees work in spaces that have better air and water quality, more daylight and more comfortable temperatures. Specifiers have started to include systems and finishes with lower volatile organic compounds, even if they may cost more than traditional systems. Sealing the building against air infiltration and investing in better circulation and filtration is becoming the new norm for high-value workspaces, especially after COVID-19.
One downside is the increased coordination required between the mechanical contractors and the wall and ceiling contractors, but many of the larger, more sophisticated contractors are including this coordination in their bidding and getting involved in projects earlier to facilitate this coordination. During a recent AWCI-sponsored peer-safety review, I experienced this coordination firsthand: large air handling and filtration units on a medical project were causing interference with head-of-wall construction, so construction was staged so all trades could get the access they needed.
In one case, where the mechanical contractor got ahead of the agreed schedule, they were required to remove their work to allow walls to be built in the proper sequence. Larger contractors now have building information modeling (BIM) departments, so in addition to clash detection, they can figure sequencing, as well as ordering their steel and gypsum products pre-cut to length, for less on-site waste and easier coordination.
While many contractors are already performing these detailed cut-to-length orders, some have purchased their own rollforming equipment and are making their own stud and track. Tools like PanelMax and PortaMill, that allow gypsum panels to be routed, bent and glued to their final shape, can eliminate corner bead and soffit framing in most applications. Robots such as hp Site Print and Dusty not only shorten layout time but also reduce layout errors, which in turn reduce waste from improperly installed materials.
In discussing the current state of developing LCAs for buildings with an industry veteran, he said that right now “it’s like the Wild West.” He said that 15 years ago, there was “a small group of nerdy people” who knew the software, knew the pitfalls and workarounds that were required and knew how to make the best LCA they could, using the data provided. Now there is better data and more of it, but the people creating the LCAs may or may not know how to use the software or the new data.
This is why the EPA grants are so important: better transparency will make it easier for owners and specifiers to make the right choice. For now, wall and ceiling material manufacturers and their associations are doing their best to both provide more transparent data and educate practitioners. As more data become available, AWCI will provide educational tools, resources and webinars to help contractors and owners make informed choices.
Don Allen, PE, SE, LEED AP, is the executive director of the Steel Framing Industry Association.
