CSU project seeks to determine carbon impact of building designs

While working on his master’s degree in construction management at Colorado State University in 2010, Peter Means saw a trend where people wanted to know the total carbon footprint of the homes they were having built for them.

At that time, there was no easy way for a builder or architect to figure that out.

Means, who is coordinator of the Carbon Footprint Metric Research Team at CSU’s School of Global Environmental Sustainability, thought it would be great to develop an easy way for builders and architects to have carbon metrics at their fingertips when designing sustainable projects.

He worked closely with Bill Farland, CSU’s vice president of research at the time, to come up with a multidisciplinary team to research this because the construction sciences department was not equipped to do it. The project won a small seed grant from the National Science Foundation, and it brought together computer scientists, civil and mechanical engineers, crop scientists, architects and even a horticulturist.

They are developing software that can integrate with the top modeling software programs out there today that will allow architects to have access to the carbon metric of every building material they use. Based on what a client requests, the design/build team would be able to push a button and find out the full carbon footprint of the project.
The project is in its beginning stages, but it has garnered a lot of attention from industry.

Means hopes to prove that the idea is a sound one so that the research team can go out and find funding for the next leg of the project.