Description
Key Learnings
- Learn about how to validate and incorporate novel bio-based materials in operational and embodied carbon analyses.
- Learn about performance and carbon trade-offs of different sustainable-design strategies.
- Learn how Autodesk products and third-party integrations enable the exploration of alternative sustainable materials.
- Learn about the process of implementing bio-based materials at scale for multiple sustainability outcomes.
Speakers
- THThomas Van HarenThomas van Haren is Ecovative's Chief Operating Officer, where he is responsbile for the mycelium composites and raw materials business lines across the United States and Europe. Ecovative's composite products are focused on replacing single use plastics, such as EPS and PU, for applications ranging from packaging to construction materials, while the raw materials business produces spawn and substrates that are required for growing these products. Thomas graduated from the London School of Economics and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
- SZSheena ZhangSheena Zhang is an AEC Sustainability Specialist at Autodesk, where she develops the internal strategy across Autodesk's portfolio for connected sustainability workflows and capabilities. Prior to Autodesk, she was a sustainability consultant to the architecture, engineering, and construction industry at Atelier Ten, where she managed projects of all scales and typologies, including adaptive reuse, museum, healthcare, and masterplans with a wide range of sustainability goals like net-zero operational and embodied carbon, zero waste of resources, and net-zero water waste. She helped develop methods to quantify projects' total carbon and has extensive experience working with many stakeholders, including building owners, design teams, and construction managers to incorporate sustainability from concept design through construction. As a LEED AP and Living Futures Accredited professional, she has a record of delivering a multitude of sustainable design benchmarks and is passionate about democratizing sustainability tools for equitable impact in the built environment. She is a registered architect and has taught at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design.
- AHArthur HarsuvanakitArthur Harsuvanakit is a Principal Research Scientist within the Industry Impact team at Autodesk Research. His role involves developing and demonstrating new tools and workflows that can enable designers to work more creatively during their design process and with less negative environmental impact. His current research aims to establish how new design strategies and measurement capabilities can enable generative design workflows to produce sustainable insights and outcomes for Product Design and Manufacturing, as well as Architecture and Construction.
ARTHUR HARSUVANAKIT: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our case study, Path to Net Zero, Validating New Materials and Strategies for Decarbonization. Before we start we've included our standard safe harbor statement as a disclaimer around any forward looking statements.
So to kick things off, here are our learning objectives. I won't read through each one, but know that we will review the implementation of bio-based materials in a real world case study, and validate its environmental impact through sustainability software tools. I'll start off our intros. My name is Arthur Harsuvanakit, I'm a principal research scientist at Autodesk Research focused on applied research projects that investigate tools and methods for achieving net zero buildings.
Melissa Kalbfliesh is not here on the call today, but I'll be representing her content and contribution to this project. She's the director of technology and operations at MicroComposites which is a division under Ecovative, a mycelium technology company.
SHEENA ZHANG: And my name is Sheena Zhang, and I'm an AAC sustainability specialist at Autodesk with a background as an architect and sustainability consultant. And I will kick us off by talking about why are we focused on hitting net zero emissions. If you're watching this, you've probably already know, but climate change is a worldwide emergency, and the global community has committed through the Paris Agreement to substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to curb global temperature increase.
In order to meet these goals, it's critical to achieve deep emissions reductions by the year 2030. And when you couple this with the fact that the built environment notoriously contributes 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The AC industry naturally has a responsibility to reduce its emissions. And we can think of these emissions in two broad categories, operational and embodied. And by operational emissions we're referring to those associated with the production of energy that gets used in the built environment when we turn on a light switch, or, say, run an air conditioner.
Historically the building industry and its codes have focused on operational energy. Globally the policy landscape has net zero targets communicated broadly and already covers almost 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. On the flip side embodied carbon is defined as the emissions from the extraction, production, transportation, and construction of building materials. Though the device you're watching this on, the floor under your feet, these all have embodied carbon emissions associated with them.
And looking at the regulatory space here, very recently embodied carbon has also entered the discussion, and we're seeing this reflected in growing embodied carbon policies across the world. In fact, just a few weeks ago at the time of this recording, the state of California has actually gone as far to incorporate embodied carbon into its building codes.
So those are the top down pressures driving carbon reductions. But let's drill down on how this impacts the AC industry. It's important to remember not to overemphasize one type of carbon over another, as AC projects often improve operational carbon while trading off embodied carbon and vice versa. So for example, a common design decision in a architectural project is to swap double for triple pane glazed windows, often to reduce operational carbon.
But keep in mind this also increases embodied carbon associated with the additional pane of glass. And depending on several factors, like the local climate, program type, where the windows are sourced, et cetera, the relative impact of these types of carbon can vary. Both types need to be assessed to create the lowest total carbon result. And so this is why in order to mitigate climate change, we have to consider the total carbon picture and we're excited to share how we've analyzed both and this applied case study.
ARTHUR HARSUVANAKIT: So one of our main partners on this demonstration project is Factory_OS, who is a leader in building volumetric modular housing based in the Bay Area of California. Their mission is to build high quality, sustainable, affordable, and dignified housing products for a diverse set of needs. The Phoenix Project is a 300 unit development in West Oakland, California delivering a mix of supportive and market rate housing. As part of this development Factory_OS is deploying a new building typology, the 12 unit single stair townhouse, designed to be adapted across California market. The project includes seven of these new buildings, which provide a unique opportunity to experiment with construction alternatives that could improve the building's sustainability, and provide learning for other climate zones.
Three buildings, which will be referring to here as building A, building B, and building C, were selected to test different combinations of performance features. So we're essentially treating these Phoenix buildings as a series of building design experiments to test and measure them against real world constraints. For our baseline, we're treating the exterior envelope to have glass fiber reinforced concrete cladding, with standard exterior wall performance, metal wall studs for framing system, and a gas boiler for hot water and air cooled water chiller. Building A will be a higher performing standard by changing its envelope cladding to BioFRP which we'll describe later, and improving the exterior wall performance with stud framing and electrical heat pumps at unit level.
Building B will also have BioFRP as an envelope cladding with passive level exterior walls and a lower window wall ratio. It will have wood wall studs and HVAC system like building A but passive level infiltration. Building C will have BioFRP envelope cladding, improved wall performance, but with larger operable windows. The building will also have same framing, infiltration, and HVAC system as building A, except with natural ventilation for cooling. To help facilitate natural ventilation, a corridor has been cut out of the middle to allow airflow through the building for building C.
So our research hypothesis is that passive house type building B, and natural ventilation type C, will be better than A. But we're not quite sure by how much. We assume that passive house type B will have a higher embodied carbon, given the climate natural ventilation. Type C will probably show higher savings based on climate for energy, and overall best scenario for total carbon.
SHEENA ZHANG: So jumping into the details of the analysis, we wanted to first clarify the scope of the study. So this slide shows the operational and embodied carbon represented across the building's life cycle. We start on the left with the embodied carbon from the material production, then consider the operations or occupied phase of the project, and then end of life, which includes disposal and other considerations like sequestration, or reuse and recycling.
And though the industry is actively moving to capture the whole life carbon, today most data is available for scopes A1 through A3, and B1 through B7, and this will be the focus of our talk today when we say total carbon. With the addition of scope D, which includes the biogenic carbon from our bio based materials.
And to start we had to select the appropriate tools to use for carbon analysis and insights into our design options. Here's a view of Autodesk solutions that can measure and reduce carbon emissions to improve sustainability across the building lifecycle. Different tools may be needed at different stages of plan, design, build, and operate, and they offer different degrees of accuracy ranging from directional to more precise analysis. Based on the level of specificity of our project and our design phase and what we wanted to analyze, we honed in on rapid systems analysis with some custom openstudio workflows as our tool to tackle operational carbon.
If you're interested in learning more about all of the tools I just showed, here's a selection of sustainability focused classes available at AU that will dive into those solutions. So let's get into it. Let's talk about operational carbon. So here are each of the four building types and the associated tools we use for energy analysis. We started here because the building design is already in Revit. So we have the model and the ability to easily generate the geometry from each building type, cutting down on analysis modeling time.
Systems analysis made the most sense based on the level of design, as we had specific HVAC equipment in mind. And it also allowed us to connect with custom openstudio measures to simulate natural ventilation. So here is a time lapse of the standard systems analysis workflow. You start with your Revit geometry and your analytical system zones, you select and refine your energy settings, you can then generate the energy analytical model or EAM, and you can verify that the model is generating as you expect. Then you select the type of energy analysis to run and when complete you can view the openstudio results directly within Revit.
For those who like to see a more linear progression, here's a version of what's happening in the back end of systems analysis. And this is the workflow we use for buildings, 0, A and B. For building C to simulate natural ventilation we had to go a more custom route. So we started with the weather data file for Oakland and created parameters for ideal conditions to operate the windows, creating a window schedule that was then added to a custom natural ventilation open studio measure. We can then go to Revit, load in the open studio workflow, and run the custom analysis, which then follows the same process as in the standard analysis. For more detailed info on custom open studio measures, definitely be sure to check out the ATop design and analysis of building electrification with Revit systems analysis.
So after running our energy analysis here are the results. So starting with our baseline type 0, which as a reminder has an average performing envelope and gas powered HVAC system, we see that heating is driving our operational emissions, as well as interior equipment and lighting loads. These two parameters were not modified as part of this particular experiment, but would also be a good starting place for additional energy savings.
Moving to type A, we see an overall reduction of 10% as a result of swapping out the inefficient gas system with more efficient electric heat pumps, and improving the envelope performance to a typical high performance spec. You can see heating and fan emissions have decreased as a result of this, and our cooling loads have actually increased as a result of better envelope performance, which is reducing heat loss to the cooler outdoor environment.
When we tighten up the building envelope and improve the envelope performance even further, moving to triple pane glazing and more insulation, tighter infiltration, we see an overall 23% improvement from type 0. And here we can see even more that the heating demands have been reduced, and our cooling loads have also increased, but overall, we're still seeing a net savings.
And then finally when we look at type C, our natural ventilation case, we were able to expand our indoor set points based on the adaptive comfort model, and this results in energy savings and a big reduction in the cooling demand as we're using the outside air to cool. However we do see an increase in heating relative to type A, potentially due to the building geometry and exterior corridor that will show in a following slide. And while it's better than type A, it's not quite as beneficial as type B from an operational emission standpoint.
And when you think about it, this makes sense. When we look at type A, we see that the building is actually more heating dominated than cooling dominated. So natural ventilation, which is primarily used for cooling would be less beneficial than having a tighter envelope to help reduce heating. And to quickly gut check this, I used a technical approach to check the local climate file, and without basically having to teach a course on building science, this is a screenshot of the climate data for Oakland with the dots and the green zone representing hours that are comfortable through natural ventilation.
And it turns out that this climate is actually more heating dominated than we had anticipated. So all the red dots on the left are hours that heating is needed. So this suggests that potentially a different space type like offices with higher density of people, and interior equipment, can benefit from internal heat gains, and see more potential benefit from natural ventilation than what we have for our project, a multifamily housing project in this climate.
So what do we learn? Well, the type B passive design is actually the best option here, going against our earlier hypothesis, though type A did indeed perform the worst out of the three. Type C did not provide as much benefit as we had anticipated, partially because of the climate is more heating and not cooling dominated, and also potentially from this exterior corridor which is represented in the sectional view of the building, which is creating more exposed exterior walls that are also overshadowed and do not receive solar heat gain.
So that's operational carbon. Let's move now to embodied carbon and the different tools for that. So we started with next gen insight, which is currently in tech preview because of ease and simplicity of moving from the Revit file to an embodied carbon analysis. But as we'll get into in the next section, it actually seemed better suited for a more conceptual level of design than we had in this specific case study, which led us to also use TallyCAT a free third party integration that also works through Revit. And again for more details on all these tools, be sure to check out that table of other AU courses if you want to get more into the technical details of how those work.
So for all four building types we looked at both Insight and TallyCAT and as I referred to earlier, Insight is fundamentally meant for earlier design phases. It's snappy, it's quick, and it's very easy to get results. But it is still in tech preview, and is just available for certain types of building elements, which meant that in order to get a more holistic picture of the buildings embodied carbon we would need to supplement with TallyCAT Also Insight uses average data from EC3 and open source database of EPDS. And EC3 also happens to be the database behind TallyCAT but TallyCAT is better for more detailed design, as it allows you to manually tweak material assemblies, and search for specific criteria or manufacturers from the EC3 database, and we'll see this in the next few slides.
So first how does Next Gen Insight work? Like with Revit systems analysis, you start with your model, and you can generate an EAM. This then sends the analysis to the insight viewer online. Once that's loaded you can then define the materials layer by layer, and view your results in a live dashboard across several different metrics, which you can see in the top right.
And here's the linear workflow for this process. You can select whether to export at a conceptual schematic or detailed level of material properties, and for this particular workflow we're showing the conceptual schematic level. And this is great if you're very early on in your project, and don't have a lot more details about your materials.
But if you're like us and had a more specific construction in mind, Next Gen Insight does have the ability to support custom components. First, you just have to assign thermal properties to each sublayer in your Revit model, and this allows the EAM to recognize each component and be brought into Insight. So once you've taken those steps, which are shown here, you can select the detailed element export and the energy settings, and from there follow the same workflow as shown earlier. And then if you like you can also create custom material definitions within Insight for things like a bio based facade panel, which of course for this project we did do.
So here are the results looking out of Insight for walls, exterior doors, and windows. And we see that exterior walls are driving the footprint of what's included in this study, followed by windows. Type A had the lowest impact with B being slightly worse due to the thicker envelope, and contrary to our hypothesis, type C was actually worse than the baseline, even, due to the additional exterior walls associated with the cutout corridor that are clad with GFRC. And of course, this is only a portion of the scope of the project, which then led us to also supplement with TallyCAT.
So the TallyCAT workflow, you start from the Revit model, you work with the add in to send or synchronize with EC3 and then you're able to refine the materials within the Model Viewer here. For specific assemblies you can also use custom builders to calculate individual components, and see your results in several different graphs, charts, or export to an Excel file. An added benefit to TallyCAT is that as you work on individual building elements, you can simultaneously view them in Revit to see the associated building geometry all without leaving the Revit window. So that's the view that you're seeing here.
And step by step workflow, it's pretty straightforward. And then you can post-process any of your results in Excel. Which is what we did here. So in this analysis we're actually seeing building B is very similar to building A, but just slightly better performing. So there's some sort of trade off happening between the reduced window to wall ratio, and additional insulation, and the triple pane glazing. And then type C also performed worse, again, likely due to the additional exterior walls that are clad with GFRC, and also the operable windows for type C added a decent amount of aluminum framing for the operable sashes. So these results are also contrary to our original hypothesis.
And naturally because we use both of these tools we wanted to do a comparison. And so we see when we focus on exterior walls, Insight actually shows higher overall impact relative to TallyCAT, and we think this is for a few reasons. First we have for this real world case study specific manufacturers in mind for the exterior, which we were able to specify in TallyCAT, whereas Insight brings in that average value from the entire database. And so like we mentioned, this works great for your earlier analysis when you have more limited data. But for this particular project, we had that information, and so we could filter for that in TallyCAT.
Similarly Insight really prioritizes ease and simplicity, which means that you can define a material type once, and it populates across the entire project anywhere you have that same material definition. However, if you have slight differences that aren't captured in how the Revit model is classified, these definitions get populated across each instance of that material, so that can help speed up your workflow if you have multiple instances of similar materials, but in this case, we actually had similar but slightly different wall types that were a little bit more difficult to parse out in the insight viewer.
Moving to the windows we see a bit more alignment between the values. However, we do see a difference in directionality, actually, between Insight and TallyCAT, primarily on type C. And this can be attributed to the fact that Insight uses an area based approach for the material definitions from the EAM, and building C has fewer windows than type A. So the embodied carbon for C, when you look at the area times the factor will naturally give you a lower result.
Whereas TallyCAT can use these builders to allow you to get into the nitty gritty and capture the frame, if you have spandrels, exterior shading, framing, et cetera. And critical for our experiment, whether you have operable windows. And so this will add the additional framing material for that optimal pane, which is driving up our embodied carbon of the windows. But of course, was helpful to reduce our operational carbon.
So how do we choose which results to use? Although the started as a somewhat academic exercise, we realize the path taken can shift the overall strategy to get to net zero. And so the elements we considered were the fact that we have specific manufacturers in mind already for the exterior walls, and also that a big part of differentiating each of the building types are the type of windows, and specifically those operable windows for natural ventilation. And also we selected based on the level of design detail that best matched the sustainability tool and level of uncertainty that one could be comfortable with.
So with all these factors in mind we rely on the TallyCAT model for our results. And we saw that type B was the best option due to the reduction in window to wall ratio, and the removal of exterior doors and decks that you can see in these side by side renderings. And again, contrary to our hypothesis, type C actually performed the worst due to the increase in exterior wall area, with the GFRC cladding in this corridor here.
And so when we look at these results category by category, we can see also that the building envelope, which includes the facade, is responsible for 30% to 50% of the overall embodied carbon footprint. And so this tees up the focus on the facade optimization that Arthur will speak to next.
ARTHUR HARSUVANAKIT: Thanks Sheena. OK, so with those assessment results in mind I'll talk about the path to finding our alternative facade material that would meet the project requirements and draw down the embodied carbon of the building. So in our exploration of understanding the environmental impact for available facade materials in the market today, we see that natural materials such as wood, cork, and mycelium, which we'll describe later in the presentation, are good alternatives for their carbon sequestration ability compared to typical facade products like aluminum paneling, or fiber cement.
But of course every material choice has a trade off and performs differently in terms of material and labor costs, as well as lifespan and construction technique. One strategy that factory had begun investigating in this project is if the factory installed facade components would help offset the cost of choosing a higher performing facade material. We learned that even though it takes [? factories ?] roughly 10 days to assemble a building with their volumetric units, it could take them up to six months to install the facade due to the amount of scaffolding and on site labor processes that need to be followed. So a factory installed facade could reduce the time of construction and labor as well as limit the number of components. This strategy allowed us room to explore a new high performing facade system with low carbon.
Which is when we began partnering with Chrysler associates, who are based in the Bay Area, and are at the bleeding edge of advanced composites for building facades. We embarked on developing a new composite sandwich panel that could be carbon neutral. Our development led us to swapping out the typical petroleum based cores of their fiberglass panels and replacing it with a biomaterial. This new biomaterial material core allows us to offset the carbon of the fiberglass, and reach a carbon negative panel due to its carbon sequestering ability. We'll refer to this facade system as BioFRP.
So beyond its carbon storage properties, this new BioFRP has added benefits of being durable for longer service life with the FRP shell, more efficient due to its ability to be fabricated in a large panel, and highly flexible in its design opportunities due to its moldability. In terms of its material performance, the existing FRP represents a high thermal acoustic fire and structural performance that typical facade cladding materials have.
So here we see the BioFRP facade visualized on the Phoenix townhouse building. Now we're going to transition to talk more about the biomaterial core of the BioFRP, our partners behind it. So Ecovative is the world's leading mycelium technology company based in Albany, New York. The company launched in 2007 and today works in food, textile for fashion and apparel, packaging, and other industries.
Our core material is based on an underlying technology called micro composites, which combines mycelium with plant fibers to form materials that contain no chemicals or plastics. The mycelium itself is a fibrous dynamic root system of mushrooms and other fungi. In the wild, mycelium naturally takes on complex forms, with many different material properties. Ecovative leverages those properties in a wide range of biomaterials and products, including the composite material used within our BioFRP facade. Being grown into a target shape micro composites avoids energy intensive steps of traditional manufacturing processes like heat forming, as well as reduces waste such as shaving standard foams to form typical fiberglass cores. It also saves time in comparison to plastic films, since we're using agricultural waste, and there doesn't need to be an extraction process.
So the hemp stalks are the primary plant fiber in these composite materials. These are low value leftovers of industrial agriculture that would otherwise be burned or wasted. Hemp can fix carbon at a rate double that of trees on a per acre basis, making the material itself and the products constructed with them into a significant repository of carbon. Rather than the atmosphere, the carbon stays embedded within the material, and when disposed of composts and returns to the soil cycle.
And rather than typical energy intensive manufacturing methods to make target forms, our facade forms are made with reusable, recyclable molds. The mix of mycelium and the plant fiber is poured in, and the organism feeds on the nutrition of the plant fiber binding itself into a strong composite until heat is applied to render the mycelium inert. The performance qualities of these parts can be varied to specific applications with a wide range of material attributes.
The mycelium core for this project were grown and ready to install into the fiberglass panel in less than seven days. That results in one fifth of the embodied energy of the petroleum based foams, and one sixth of the CO2 emissions to produce them.
Of course, the sustainable material isn't going to make much of a difference if it doesn't stack up against the traditional materials in terms of performance properties as a facade. And the mycelium material has a classifier rating with a flammability point of 684 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to average spray foam, and in this project the core has an r-value of 3 inch-- 3 per inch. That's comparable to most fiberglass rockwool and other typical insulation foams.
Of course insulation also helps with absorbing acoustic energy, and here mycelium also performs well. The material provides over 20db of vibration insulation from 500 to around 3000hz in a vertical direction, and over 20 decibel reduction from 500 to 5000hz in the horizontal. This is ideal for absorbing vehicle noise, which hovers around a frequency of 1000hz, and it's also helpful to any buildings near a busy highway or road which in this case for the Phoenix Project site it exists. Again, with the modification of growth process these attributes can be further adjusted and dialed in which Ecovative is actively doing for this project.
Now every building facade faces constant exposure to the elements. Here we see the physical mockup of a panel cut as a demonstration to expose the mycelium core. And one question that comes up a lot about mycelium composites is if it rots or decays, and if you have to replace it. Well, after it's dehydrated, the mycelium is stable as long as it's dry, and it's kept dry and protected from further degradation by the fiberglass panels. Overall mycelium is a compelling example of how biomaterials can change the long term thinking around architecture and construction, and make them less extractive and carbon intense and more reciprocal with their environments. We hope that by demonstrating this material on a building project we can be an example of that long term thinking.
SHEENA ZHANG: So with that in mind, let's return back to our analysis, incorporating the BioFRP, and actually look at our total carbon results. So assuming a typical 50 year life span, type B has the lowest total carbon, and as you recall it has a similar embodied carbon footprint of type A in terms of embodied carbon, and a best out of all three options in the operational carbon resulting in its crowning as the best option. And now the moment we've all been waiting for, can we actually get to net zero?
So first on the left we start by taking into consideration the biogenic carbon sequestration from the bio based materials, which gets us to a 13% reduction of total carbon, which offsets the embodied carbon of the project. Then to tackle the operational or operational carbon we ran an analysis in Revit to see on site PV potential using the roof. By adding these PV panels we would be remiss in a total carbon talk not to also account for the added embodied carbon of the panels themselves, which we can see brings us to an overall 1% increase from where we started. However we can generate well over 300,000 kbtu per year from renewable energy, more than sufficient to offset both the operational and embodied carbon emissions to meet our net zero emissions target.
So with the analysis behind us, we can't help but look ahead and think about what's next. In terms of software everything we've shown here was done with tools that are available today. They all work with Revit, and they can provide a lot of power. However, building models finding the materials systems and running analysis is only a part of the work. And the most important part is actually integrating all the data and analysis into meaningful insights, especially for a broader project team, and client where it's important to clearly communicate everything from key inputs and assumptions in order to build trust, set clear targets, and assess trade offs between design options and track your overall design progress.
So while the existing tools are great at the raw analysis, they tend to leave the job of creating and communicating insights to the analyst, which can be very challenging and requires great subject matter expertise. So to address this and to help democratize sustainability analysis to broader audiences, we at Autodesk are developing Next Gen Insight currently available as a tech preview. And the vision is to create a simple collaborative workspace which project teams can use to target, trade off, and track key design performance metrics and factors in a very open and flexible way.
And so the screenshot here is just a prototype of what this vision looks like. But you can quickly imagine how it would have been useful for a project like Phoenix to create a simple overview containing the key metrics we've been discussing account for project specific factors like reduced material waste due to the prefabrication process, or account for landscape carbon sequestration. And then all of these different metrics factors and options could be brought together in one place and used to explore and explain design decisions.
We're at a really interesting stage of the development. So be sure to check out the AU class total carbon data analysis and insights to find out more, and also how to get involved in helping to shape its development from here. In addition to expanding our solutions and our total carbon insights, we're also continuing to expand the scope of the study. So in addition to total carbon insights, the team is also working on a third party verified lifecycle assessment for the BioFRP panel, which would allow us to also take into consideration the maintenance and operations for a whole life cycle assessment.
The landscape design and sequestration will also be incorporated to provide an even more holistic picture of the total carbon of the project. And we'll continue to use these results to inform the design with Factory_OS and we'll continue also to expand and refine the use of mycelium for various applications within the AC industry and beyond.
So what have we learned? What are our key takeaways? Well, we've confirmed that you can't optimize what you don't measure. And also not to rely on hypotheses without analysis. A total carbon assessment is needed for complete sustainability picture, and in this process, it's important to be thoughtful around the tools you're using, the level of detail, how far you are in the design, and the carbon data being used. We've also learned that bio based materials are a great and critical piece in reducing the embodied carbon of a building, and meeting climate goals through incremental improvements, but also addressing other performance based criteria.
And we also need more partners like Factory_OS to test these emerging technologies in the real world dealing with real constraints, while still being open to new opportunities so that we can scale up in the pursuit of decarbonizing architecture for a more sustainable world. So thank you for tuning in. And that's our talk.
ARTHUR HARSUVANAKIT: Thanks.