Carbon Leadership Forum | Embodied Carbon 101 in the Construction Process
Wed, Jul 15
|Barbara Weitz Community Engagement Cente
The Carbon Leadership Forum accelerates the transformation of the building sector to radically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to materials (also known as embodied carbon) used in buildings and infrastructure.
Time & Location
Jul 15, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Barbara Weitz Community Engagement Cente, 6400 S University Dr Rd N, Omaha, NE 68182, USA
About the Event
Embodied carbon is the emission footprint that comes from harvesting, transporting, and manufacturing building materials. Each stage in the process of getting building materials to a construction site causes greenhouse emissions and this carbon footprint from the materials can be very significant. Since the embodied carbon of building is so significant it’s important that we learn how to work with these numbers and come up with accurate figures.
We need to do a basic accounting of how embodied carbon is associated with each material and then how much embodied footprint an entire building will have if we’re going to be able to reduce it. To understand embodied carbon we need data. This data comes from studies called ‘Life Cycle Assessments’ or LCAs which look at all phases of the materials life span and add up all the carbon emissions that happen.
In most scenarios we’re looking at a ‘Cradle to…