A team of students from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has built a near-zero embodied carbon building on campus using hempcrete, wood, and steel as primary materials. — Construction Canada
Called the Third Space Commons, the project was led by Third Quadrant Design, UBC’s first green building design team. The group is comprised of 60 students from the Faculty of Applied Science and the Sauder School of Business. The building is a wooden structure spanning 2,400 square feet, made from the adaptive reuse of an existing single-family home on the campus. Every aspect of the project, from the materials to the building methods, were chosen to decrease and capture carbon emissions.
The building’s thermal insulation is made of hempcrete, a concrete substitute made of lime and hemp fibers that is effective in carbon sequestration. Its foundation was constructed with reusable steel piles, and, for most of the project, the team used light wood framing instead of engineered wood, which contains fossil fuel-derived adhesives. The team also reused many materials from other construction sites in Vancouver, including the building’s windows, solar panels, appliances, and lumber, which were set for landfills.
With the Third Space Commons, Third Quadrant Design was able to produce up to 80 percent fewer carbon emissions than if they had used conventional methods and materials. As a result, the team received the B.C. Embodied Carbon Award for Small Building Construction from the Carob Leadership Forum (CLF) British Columbia.
3 Comments
Is this "light wood framing instead of engineered wood, which contains fossil fuel-derived adhesives" a knock on glulam specifically? Presumably wouldn't apply to dübelholz or NLT which seems to be getting more attention lately?
Nam - i haven't heard of either of those, do you have a link? We took quite a few design-build labs as part of my undergrad and the point was always made that adhesive use (beyond the standard wood glue or similar) gave off some seriously toxic gasses, so much that we were required to have full respiration masks and work only in the ventilation room. Regardless, light-wood framing and glulam of any sort are so different to the point of being a useless comparison in my mind ...
Hi, try https://www.treehugger.com/brettstapel-another-way-building-wood-4856433 + https://www.larchlab.com/mid-rise-mass-timber-cities-are-the-proven-climate-solution/ + https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666165919300043
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