Sustainable Design Quarterly Update - October 2025
Sustainable Design
A challenge for many structural engineers that are new to sustainable design is how to quantify the sustainability of a project. In recent years, the most common metric that is used is the measurement of the amount of carbon the building emits over its lifetime. The carbon is broken down into two categories: operational carbon, which is the carbon emitted during the use of the building (ie. HVAC, electricity, etc.) and embodied carbon, the carbon that is used to make the materials that form the building (ie. structural materials, duct work, furniture, cladding, etc.).
In the structural world we mostly focus on embodied carbon to measure the sustainability of our designs since our scope has minimal impact on the operational carbon. An obstacle that has become apparent over recent years is that calculation methods of embodied carbon have varied and this can make it difficult to compare different projects.
In the hopes of addressing this issue, ASCE has released a Prestandard for Assessing the Embodied Carbon of Structural Systems for Buildings. The prestandard’s primary objectives are to create a standard practice for assessing embodied carbon of structural systems and making comparisons between structural systems. This will also help support the efforts of the SE2050 program. A link to the free prestandard can be found here: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/
If you are interested in joining the committee, please reach out to Bill McNally at [email protected].
