Page 24 - Georgia Forestry - Issue 3 - Summer 2023

The committee’s January meeting detailed established building life cycles: A1 – A3 Product Stage; A4 – A5 Construc- tion Process Stage; B1 – B7 Use Stage; and C1 – C4 End of Life Stage. These categories would play important roles in devising measurement systems for the registry. It was decided the group would use the U.S. Department of Energy’s Commercial Prototype Building models to establish baseline categories for occu- pancy data and structural systems when they are developed. Two important sub- committees were formed — embedded carbon and embodied carbon — which would develop rules for how individual projects will calculate and report these carbons for their projects.
Math Is Hard,
Carbon Is Harder
As winter turned to spring, monthly meetings continued and propelling gears were gathering momentum. The COVID pandemic dictated that meetings were conducted via Teams calls, with good use made of shared screens and presentation software. Committee Chair Dr. Russell Gentry of the Georgia Tech School of Architecture created an operational framework and process-model flow chart, which examined the perspective of a developer trying to register a building. Building comparison details about Tech’s sustainably developed crown jewel, the Kendeda Building, were shared.
It’s difficult for a layman to imagine the amount of research necessitated by this mission and the knowledge levels required to evaluate the myriad components associated with fulfilling this carbon formula challenge. Yet by summer, these experts were feeling a sense of urgency. They created an outline of everything that was needed in the registry and assigned tasks to the corresponding subject experts.
“Math is hard,” said Managing Direc- tor of Timberland and committee mem- ber Troy Harris, “and carbon is harder. There are lots of credible people study- ing carbon and there is no one standard. Georgia is the first state to do this and the world is watching.”
In August, three committee members met with Jamestown, which agreed to work with their architectural engineer- ing consultants to calculate the embod- ied carbon in their planned mass timber building at 619 Ponce. The firm agreed that the building could become the example structure used in the carbon registry protocol. With copious amounts
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