New Guidance Empowers Action on Embodied Carbon in North America

Progress on the quest for true net zero buildings

The journey towards true net zero buildings gains momentum in North America with the launch of the Embodied Carbon Calculation Guide for North America (TM65NA). Developed in a partnership between the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), TM65NA provides a comprehensive framework for calculating the embodied carbon impact of building systems for the North American market.

This guidance is an extension of the  Embodied Carbon in Building Services: A Calculation Methodology (TM65), which was originally published in 2021 to help calculate the embodied carbon associated with all mechanical, electrical, and public health products in all building types when no Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) are available.

Closing the industry knowledge gap

Reducing the embodied carbon of buildings – the emissions associated with the raw materials, construction, transportation, and end-of-life of those materials — is a critical step to lowering the whole-life carbon impacts of buildings.

Until recently, gaps in knowledge and understanding about approaches to calculating embodied carbon have hindered our ability to weigh different equipment and design recommendations for building systems such as plumbing, electrical, and HVAC, which can contribute up to 50 percent of a new building's embodied carbon impact.

Louise Hamot, Introba's Global Lead of Sustainable Innovation and a lead author of the original TM65 guide said, "This North America guide is another step to help us close the industry knowledge gap around data and move us closer to reducing and eliminating embodied carbon in projects around the world."

“We developed the original guidance in response to the need to adopt a Whole Life Carbon approach to designing our buildings, which considers both operational and embodied carbon," said Louise. "By partnering with industry groups such as ASHRAE and CIBSE, we're expanding our geographic reach to more building professionals and enabling them to understand the carbon footprint of our building systems and hopefully mitigate the impact."

To access TM65NA, visit CIBSE's website at Embodied Carbon in Building Services: A Calculation Methodology for North America.

This guide works in tandem with the original TM65 document and follows the steps outlined in the earlier publication TM65LA, which covers using the methodology outside the UK.

Using the TM65 methodology, Introba also authored a series of studies at the system level for CIBSE to try to understand which MEP strategies are more effective in reducing embodied carbon.