Tracing Mass Timber’s Full Life Cycle
Design firm Corgan recently unveiled its Mass Timber Carbon Calculator. This free and open-source tool allows design teams to more accurately quantify the embodied emissions of specific projects. Typically, mass timber’s climate benefits are framed in terms of the wood’s capacity for carbon storage and lower emissions associated with manufacturing. Corgan has effectively repositioned the goalposts, using slash-related biogenic carbon and transportation emissions as integral metrics in the larger question of mass timber’s carbon impact.
“Our industry is ignoring the biogenic carbon that’s associated with the extraction and harvesting of timber from forests,” says Varun Kohli, principal and director of sustainability at Corgan. “So we asked, what happens if we include that? Will that mean mass timber is no longer the solution we thought it was?”
