University officials prioritized resilience against natural disasters in the building design for this earthquake-prone region. Resilience is also evident in the permeable and green surfaces that capture rainwater, along with an underground water retention system for adapting to frequent flooding.

The wide use of glass for natural daylight and solar panel arrays further led to this project’s success, as did the sustainable materials, sealants, coatings, and finishes.

This project developed a unique material by mixing bio-resin with powdered discarded Igusa grass from recycled Tatami mats.

Igusa is a renewable, perennial grass and natural carbon sink that absorbs and stores atmospheric CO₂ within its stalk and soil.

The biodegradable mixture has been 3-D printed to propose furniture that re-weaves Tatami into modern life — regeneratively.

This master plan aims to regenerate and give back to the community a Green Village.

Notable interventions include — facades integrated with a technological network to collect rainwater from roofs; green façades to create a natural bioregulation of internal temperatures; providing 60,000sqm of new green areas and planting 1,200 new trees for absorbing CO₂ from the urban environment.

This remarkable upgrade of two 1980s office blocks to become energy-positive buildings will generate more energy than consumed over their lifetime. The ambitious objective recognizes the energy used for construction, renovation, operation, and end-of-life.

The award-winning design combines highly efficient energy systems to heat radiators and water, ventilate air, cool the buildings in summer, and much more.

This single-space structure is built with a combination of sustainable materials and construction debris from local sites.

The pavilion treads lightly, standing without concrete footings, enabling it to be dismantled to retrieve and reuse all its materials or reassembled elsewhere.

Learn how SRDA employed climate resilient materials and adaptive building methods to create this award-winning project.

The site is the largest LEED v4 BD+C: NC Platinum certified project in the world and The largest facility to ever attain the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) Living Building Challenge (LBC) Water Petal Certification.

In addition, heating and cooling for this project is supplied by the largest geo-thermal pile system in North America.

By reducing energy demands, using energy efficient systems and equipment, and incorporating a clean supply of renewable energy, the facility goes beyond Net Zero Emissions, producing a surplus of reusable energy that will be stored in onsite batteries and used to power EV charging stations.

This is the largest net-zero facility of its kind.

Adaptive reuse offers another path to carbon reduction by retrofitting and upgrading current building stocks.

Reuse challenges us to think differently about aesthetics and consumption because it limits new construction, furnishings, and fixtures in order to lower their embodied carbon tally.

By doing so we lessen the need for all things to be new and promote a more circular outcome.

This project exemplifies adaptive reuse by ––

Utilizing existing building stock and simultaneously reducing demolition waste.

Repurposing removed building materials to create architectural features while minimizing the use of virgin materials.

Leveraging low-carbon mass timber from sustainably forested North American sources.

The Kamikatsu Zero Waste Center embodies the principle of Zero Waste by offering 45 categories of recyclable waste disposal, a store for upcycled goods, a community hall, a communal office, and a hotel.

This benchmark project thoughtfully utilizes local materials and building capabilities combined with clever adaptive reuse.

The town’s recycling rate surpasses 80%.

Taking inspiration from nature, Urban Sequoia NOW is a design for a building that will sequester carbon throughout its lifecycle.

The concept, readily constructible today, rethinks projects as living organisms that significantly reduce embodied carbon, generate energy, and absorb carbon while lasting much longer than the typical 60-year lifespan of a building.

By considering all stages of the building process: material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and installation, RICA’s embodied carbon will be 44% less than the global average for institutional works. RICA is predicted to be climate-positive by 2044, removing more carbon from that point forward than was produced from the campus’ creation and ongoing operations.

The more carbon is transformed to replace petrochemicals, the more its utilization forms a new frontier. And design for decarbonization becomes its new growth opportunity.

Now aspects of the built environment can be decarbonized by design –– its architecture, interiors, exteriors, and landscapes, as well as all the products and packaging used within it.

Twelve transforms carbon to replace fossil fuel-based materials with carbon-free CO₂Made® materials made from air, not oil.

From sunglass lenses developed with product design partner PANGAIA Lab to CO₂Made® car parts for Mercedes Benz, Twelve is developing diverse product applications that span across many industries.

FLOR, an Interface company, offers three types of backings that are designed to move beyond carbon-neutral and toward a carbon-negative future.

The backings include CQUEST™ GB, CQUEST™ Bio, and CQUEST™ BioX.

You can learn more below.

Many of the world’s products are made of materials with high embodied greenhouse gas emissions. These lead to varying degrees of damage to the natural environment.

To address the climate emergency, MOAs scientists are developing compounds to substitute all those materials. Their Carbon Lab and its research is at the intersection of material science and carbon sequestration.

Unlike synthetic materials, the AirCarbon molecule is a substance made throughout nature and can be re-consumed by natural microorganisms like leaves or twigs, enabling life to restore itself.

Compostable, dishwasher safe, and FDA approved, AirCarbon is ideal for creating foodware products and more.

On is leading a new supply chain coalition to reshape carbon waste into running shoes, working with LanzaTech and Borealis.

We make carbon emissions the starting point for the creation of EVA (ethylene vinyl acetate) foam – a material we can engineer into high-performance cushioning for running shoes.

Rapidly renewable hemp provides a natural alternative to EPS insulation (expanded polystyrene) for packaging purposes while sequestering more CO₂ than trees per acre.

NOTPLA is committed to making plastic disappear by producing packaging with seaweed –– abundant, carbon sequestering, rapidly renewable, biodegradable, and home compostable –– one of our greatest natural weapons against climate change.

See Oceans 2050, www.oceans2050.com, an organization leading the global effort to quantify seaweed carbon sequestration.