The Progress Paradox: How Codes Create Carbon

The Building Science Podcast

The episode explores the 'progress paradox' in architecture, where modern building practices often result in higher carbon footprints than historical methods

Key takeaways

• Kelly Alvarez Doran's firm, Ha/f Climate Design, aims to halve greenhouse gas emissions from buildings by 2030.
• Building codes in North America often contain loopholes where basement floor area does not count toward gross floor area, incentivizing carbon-intensive concrete construction.
• Minimum parking requirements force developers to build deep underground garages and heavy transfer slabs, significantly increasing embodied carbon.
• The production of aluminum is highly problematic due to the release of hexafluoride, a potent greenhouse gas byproduct of smelting.
• The use of extruded polystyrene (XPS) is criticized for its high environmental impact and the pollution associated with its manufacturing.

Main topics

• Embodied Carbon
• Building Code Loopholes
• Urban Density

Notable quotes

Buildings are rivers.

Conclusion

Architects hold significant leverage through their role as specifiers

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to the Building Science Podcast. Welcome to this. Welcome to the Building Science Podcast. Welcome to the Building Science Podcast. Bringing Speaker 2 (0:18) the human factor to architecture and design. Brought to you by Positive Energy in Austin, Texas. Speaker 1 (0:30) Okay, hello and welcome back everybody. Welcome back to the Building Science Podcast. I'm Christophe Irwin. Today we are talking about scaling architectural impact in the context of decarbonizing construction. And our guest for today's interview is Kelly Alvarez-Duran of Half Architecture in the UK. Kelly is an architect, educator, and impassioned climate nerd whose work focuses on the intersection of technical decarbonization and professional agency. So today's theme are his themes. So he's currently a leading voice in the movement to halve the emissions of the built environment by 2030. And you might notice halve the emissions at his architecture firm, Half, which is H-A backslash F. Kelly's career began in the resource development sector, mining. He got to see the root of the extractive economy. He gained international recognition during his time at Mass Design Group, fantastic firm. He served as the East African director based in Kigali, Rwanda, and later as the senior director of sustainability and regenerative design. In these roles, he oversaw the growth of the practice from eight to 80 people. and led the design of several award-winning low-carbon projects that prioritized regional materials and regional labor. Kelly currently splits his time between London, UK, Toronto, and Canada. And his firm, Half Climate Design, was founded in 2022 along with Juliet Cook. Their firm is a research and design consultancy with a mission to halve greenhouse gas emissions. from buildings this decade. Yay, audacious. I hope we pull it off. Their firm works with architects, city planners, and policy makers, big levers, to conduct whole building lifecycle assessments, develop circular economy strategies, and design low-carbon policy frameworks. Kelly is also a father and a self-described prairie person from Winnipeg. And like many of us, Kelly sees a world worth saving, not through jargon, but through the very real agency of the Architects Pen. Kelly, before we get into the interview, anything else you want to say about yourself? And welcome. Speaker 2 (2:52) Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity. I think you covered it. Okay, I covered it. Speaker 1 (2:58) All right, so here goes my introductory blurb. And it goes back to this. Pretty wonderful AIA poster. I think it came out of AIA 2030, and it shows a picture of the Earth in space. And then the words on it are, One site. Countless challenges. A looming deadline. This is the ultimate project. And it really is, right? So the ultimate project is kind of central to it, is taking care. of our resources, of ourselves, our planet, and not wasting things, not destroying things like exergy, topsoil, aquifers, clean air, you know, arable land, and really not leaving a mess for our kids, for our next generations. I have a mild, mild rant here about terminology. We talk about decarbonization. And so this decarbonization embodied emissions. I'd really like to call it what it is, which is pollution, right? You know, when we emit materials into the world that have negative outcomes for living creatures and the ecosystems upon which we all depend, we know that as pollution. So I really think it would be better to not wrap it up in insider techno jargon. Speaker 1 (4:15) Like the Cuyahoga River caught fire. So did the Rogue in Detroit and the Buffalo River in New York. No one would question whether it's bad to dump a barrel of petrochemicals into a river. Yet somehow we appear a little bit unclear or at least a little bit blasé about dumping more than 40 billion tons of carbon pollution into the sky each year. So... Since 40 billion tons is one of those phrases that just makes your brain go into a TV test pattern, I did a little background research. That's more than 100 times, 100 times more than volcanoes emit every year, right? So there was a huge massive eruption in like 1990s Mount Pinatubo. Speaker 1 (5:02) And it had global impacts that were well known. And we humans, we emit a Mount Pinatubo of carbon every day before lunch, right? So I'm almost done here. But, you know, really, the point is we can't look at natural events to excuse or explain the scale of modern industrial pollution. Speaker 1 (5:24) If we get a lot of things, other things right, but we don't get decarbonization right, we're going to miss the mark. So that's sort of the bad news. And the good news is that as Kelly well knows, we all have agency to reverse that. So architectural agency and impact in the context of decarbonization. Okay, Kelly, that's my introduction. I know this is a theme you've long pondered and one that you've found ways to leverage. You leverage your agency and role power. So I guess let's just get started. Any thoughts on AEC impacts or anything else that you'd like to open with? Speaker 2 (6:05) Well, he laid it out. I think my company is called Half for kind of two basic reasons. We started in 2020. And under the Paris Agreement, which most countries are still signatories of, the agreement was we need to have our 2018 emissions by 2030 and to get to zero by 2050. And my thinking was 2050 is too far away. We're going to procrastinate. And if we just focused on this decade, the one we are... you know, 6.42 the way through right now. If we could figure out how to have our emissions this decade, getting to zero is going to be easy because we'll figure out all the ways to do it. Speaker 1 (6:46) And Speaker 2 (6:46) so, yeah, in 2020, we kind of started a research studio at University of Toronto based on that idea. And then the other half is the fact that the built environment, buildings, infrastructure are half of global emissions. Wow. The construction and maintenance of the built environment is what is half the problem. And then it actually compounds because the built environment then also kind of engenders transportation emissions as well. So to me, the built environment is really the biggest problem to solve and why it's, I think, a good time to be, you know, working in it. Speaker 1 (7:21) Yeah, it's a big lever. Right. And I was trying to. illustrate that kind of the good news, bad news, right? Bad news is it's big impact. Good news, it's a big impact. Speaker 2 (7:30) Exactly. Speaker 1 (7:31) So by the way, listeners, I've seen Kelly speak a couple of times and pretty impressive. You talk about this progress paradox, this EUI timeline graph. Could you open up with that too? Speaker 2 (7:45) Yeah, I mean, I think the energy use intensity of like our lifestyles, and I think that like how that's changed over time. I think basically if we look back not far, like just in the last hundred years and compare the amount of energy and what associated emissions that we have personally compared to those of say our parents and grandparents, like it's exponentially grown as has the size of our housing, as has the size of our cities. et cetera. It's really in the last generation that we've seen such explosion on a personal consumption basis. And I think what I could continue to think about is what was it like a hundred years ago? How did we build a hundred plus, maybe a hundred, 120 years ago? All like life before cars, life before reinforced concrete, life before the air conditioner, which I think are the three things that have really screwed us up. as a civilization. The three inventions I would love to undo. The way we lived and the way we built was far less emissive on any basis, and certainly from an EUI basis. Speaker 1 (8:51) Yeah. It gets me thinking immediately about what are the underlying invisible paradigms that support that? It's kind of a tangent, but it's as though we see it as progress, what we've done with our life and our lifestyle. And in some ways it is, right? We've lived longer. We have a lot of convenience. But in other ways, we have impacts that we're not paying attention to. Speaker 2 (9:19) The opposite is I live in London, United Kingdom. A hundred years ago, the air was far more polluted. The emissions per capita probably were still higher because people weren't flying for their vacation. They were taking trains out to the English coastline as opposed to flying to Crete. But there's a lot of things that have changed in the last hundred years that have probably helped, you know, reduce emissions, like the amount of transportation that I enjoy here in London or, you know, took the train to Switzerland and back this past week. In five hours. I think these are things that we've created as well that are, like, we know all the ways out of the problem. It's just a kind of matter of creating the political will to actually take them on. Speaker 1 (10:01) Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about, speaking of rivers, my mom lives in Basel and just in the late 80s, right? They had that Sandoz disaster where a chemical spill turned the river red, killed all the creatures in it. That was just 1986. And yet now. People swim in it. It's clean, right? People actually commute in it. They have these bags that float and that are waterproof and they put their work materials. I've seen laptops in them. And then they float down the river, get out, towel off and go to work. Kind of wild. Speaker 1 (10:48) So on this podcast, we have posed kind of like a koan is a building more like a rock or a river, right? Buildings seem to just sit there, but in reality, they represent like a flow of resources from the geobiosphere into that building and then eventually back into the geobiosphere. So in the intro, I talked about your origin story or one of your first, I guess, careers was in the mining industry. And it kind of has some tie in there. Speaker 2 (11:18) Yeah. Well, a building is definitely a river. It's always moving at different speeds, depending on what part of the building you're talking about. And I think like, you know, odd full circle way, when I graduated in 2008. I got a job with a Toronto-based planning and architecture firm that did a lot of work for Toronto-based mining companies. You know, I think Canadians, we tend to, we know how to dig a very big hole in other parts of the world, including our own backyard. And I found myself about two years working in Zambia, Panama, Ghana, Turkey, Mongolia, on or beside large resource development projects, you know, i.e. copper mines by and large. And what I saw is where this metal comes from. All of the electrification that we're talking about is reliant on things like copper mines in the jungle of Panama, where this metal is coming from. And ultimately, these holes displace people. They displace ecosystems. They have a whole bunch of externalities. They completely change the landscape in which... they sit upon and everything around them and how it's changed panama politically even in that case i think like that really beginning to see the social ecological part of it over a few years and then kind of coming back to this work through learning a bit more about where things come from in the rwandan setting where we were trying to avoid mines as much as possible and then once learning about life cycle assessment for me was a way to then kind of put these things together and be like, oh, okay, now it begins to connect. Like the beginning of my career and beginning to see how it's all connecting together. And ultimately, you know, buildings are rivers, but they're rivers full of rocks in the stream or whatever kind of sediment in the stream of material that's flowing down from somewhere else. And so I think it's probably both actually. It's probably, you know, some form of the minerals and the water of the building and really understanding. where those things are coming from and the impacts they have. And I think like that, yeah, I don't know. I think that, that, that moment in my career. And actually also I spent a year working in Fort McMurray, Alberta, doing a regional plan for the oil sands back then. And I remember the feeling the first time I drove the length of the oil sands, how like emotionally devastated I felt coming back to it. And that was just, again, that was 20 years ago now and it's tripled in size. You know, I think like we're far too often. materials are so abstract from us that have never been to these places to really understand the impact of the decisions that we're making. Speaker 1 (13:57) Yeah. That's so such an important perspective, right? The, the wounds, the wounds that are happening to the planet surface, to the ecosystems. I found it fascinating that you brought in the social and political context in Panama and probably in, in many areas that are. quote unquote, lucky enough to have resources that we want to go get. Now, these were all Canadian mining companies with operations in these other countries. Is that right? Speaker 2 (14:28) Yeah, that's right. So I think, you know, international mining of the companies that are publicly traded, quite a few of them are based or headquartered in Canada. Australia is another big headquarters, Switzerland, a few of them are based, a few American ones, but like per capita, I'd say, Australia, South Africa and Canada have a disproportionate size of mining companies. And then there's a whole bunch of not publicly traded companies, you know, largely from China, that you encounter as well in these parts of the world where minerals. exist and have yet to be excavated. Speaker 1 (15:00) Yeah. Yeah. And I know we need to get off this theme. I just have one more kind of related idea come up. But Speaker 2 (15:05) yeah, when Speaker 1 (15:06) you say minerals, right, minerals are gradually made over hundreds of millions of years. Right. So when we're mining, right, we talked about digging deep holes in the earth. Yeah, they're very deep. They have big impacts on aquifers. They're also, it's fascinating. It's like we're going back in time. We're like literally mining the past. And you mentioned earlier the difference in lifestyle between our parents and our grandparents, you know, changes each generation you go back, quickly changes. This fundamental difference is just, it's like so stark, but somehow we don't pay attention to it, which is let's do grandparents. Our grandparents generally lived off of real time flows of energy and resources, most of which were pretty near the surface, right? You know, they weren't going back neither in time nor in physical depth. Pretty much. Speaker 2 (15:59) Our grandparents would never throw away an aluminum can, that's for sure. Speaker 1 (16:14) Okay, so in the introduction, we talked about half climate design, doing research and design consultancy to have emissions and that you work with architects and city planners. So could you talk about what sort of your work and the decarbonization toolkits that you've developed in that consultancy role? Speaker 2 (16:34) Yeah, I guess. So the background of half is I was living at this point in the UK. I learned about the impact of the built environment. I learned about embodied carbon a few years earlier. And I just had my son and I was trying to figure out how to address my climate anxiety and kind of seeing where Canada and the United States were relative, where Denmark, where I was living at the time, and their policy around these things, where European policy sat, knowing the work we had done in Rwanda. And I was like, well, how can I