The Mass Timber Carbon Gap No One Talks About w/ Varun Kohli of Corgan
What if the celebrated sustainability of your mass timber project is built on an incomplete carbon ledger? If you’re in a rush to use mass timber purely as a climate solution, you could be overlooking a critical detail: only about 35% of a harvested tree ends up in the building. The rest—bark, branches, roots—rarely factors into standard carbon accounting, even though its fate can dramatically alter a project’s true environmental impact. So, how do you get the whole picture?
As Varun Kohli puts it, “that [material is] rarely tracked in typical LCA models. But that carbon matters.” For architects, engineers, and developers committed to rigorous sustainability, understanding where biogenic carbon hides—and how to account for it—has become a new frontier in responsible design.
