Reducing embodied carbon in buildings: Opportunities and caveats

Barbara Reck, Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment and Director Material Systems at Bauhaus Earth, Berlin gives a lecture titled Reducing embodied carbon in buildings: Opportunities and caveats.

Barbara Reck is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment and Director Material Systems at Bauhaus Earth, Berlin. She holds a doctorate in environmental engineering from TU Berlin in Germany and, prior to joining Yale, worked as Manager Environmental Affairs at Lufthansa German Airlines. She studies material cycles, their degree of circularity, recycling barriers, and implications for embodied carbon; work that informs environmental and resource policy as well as circular economy assessments. Her systems approach is rooted in detailed material flow studies of metals, plastics, and textiles that led to the development of internationally recognized, harmonized metal recycling indicators, a method to assess metal criticality that was applied to 60+ elements, and scenarios on the future supply and demand of key technology metals. More recently, she studies the supply and carbon implications of substituting conventional with regenerative low-carbon, often bio-based building materials.