10 design commandments for cutting your building’s embodied carbon

How to reduce embodied carbon in the built environment

Reducing embodied carbon in buildings is critical to achieving net zero and carbon neutral construction targets. Yet there is much uncertainty about how to reduce embodied carbon. Here, we have distilled some of the most effective approaches into 10 easy-to-follow design rules or commandments.

We created an example baseline building design to quantify the potential impact of adopting these practices. Our baseline design achieved embodied carbon reductions of a third, with potential for cost savings in materials too when retaining traditional structural materials.