Whether designing for equity in education, accessible healthcare, inclusive communities, new scientific discoveries or the “next big idea” in business, Cannon Design leverages a full suite of end-to-end services to help organizations and the people and communities they serve to flourish. Cannon Design does this through a design approach they created called Living-Centered Design. Living-Centered Design realizes that to create a world where people continuously flourish, we must address the complex interdependencies that exist between people, businesses, communities, society and the environment. We talk with Eric Corey Freed, director of sustainability at Cannon Design, about how a well-designed building can not only have an environmental impact but also increase productivity. How can we achieve that? Listen to Eric on Mindful Businesses podcast.
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Cannon Design – Living Centered Design
[Start 00:00:00]
Introduction
Eric Corey Freed: But now we're just starting to get into what's called parametric modeling, where essentially, we can use software. And depending on what parameters we put in, we can say generate a hundred different facades that meet these parameters and the computer can kind of spit these out. And then we can kind of go through them and eliminate some and narrow it down quite a bit. And then from that, really start to do a level of analysis we never thought possible. So instead of just building big blocky beams everywhere, we can use this parametric analysis to essentially 3d print the beam. That is just the structure that you need.
Vidhya Iyer: Welcome to Mindful Businesses presented by Saraani and I'm your host Vidhya Iyer. In our podcasts, we bring to you brands which are mindful in their practices and processes. A mindful business adopts and employs sustainable social economic and environmental practices. Today, we have with us Eric Corey Freed, Director of Sustainability at Cannon Design, Living Centered Design. He joins us from Portland, Oregon. Welcome Eric.
Start of Podcast
Eric Corey Freed: Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Vidhya Iyer: So according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2018 United States consumed 17% of the world's energy, but we have only 4% of the world's population.
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah.
Vidhya Iyer: Not pointing fingers, but why do we consume far more than the other countries?
Eric Corey Freed: That is a complicated question with an even more complicated answer. In part, I think we do it because we feel we're entitled to do it and part we do it because we can, in part, we do it because we've now somehow conflated wealth with consumption. And I don't know if it's necessarily making us a better country or happier country. I do know that despite how much energy we use and how much more we use than, you know, than our share, we also seem to rank really low among other countries in terms of happiness and health and longevity and life expectancy and infant mortality and all these other metrics. So, if you look at us by the numbers, I would say that we're probably failing across the board in every category, but you know, it's very easy to get depressed if you just look at the numbers. And I think in my business, because I'm an architect, I tend to focus on how we can redesign things toward hope.
Vidhya Iyer: So, in terms of consumption, what percent is commercial and what percent is residential?
Eric Corey Freed: Oddly enough, if we're just looking at pure energy consumption in buildings, it's about half.
Vidhya Iyer: Really?
Eric Corey Freed: Right, 50/50 for residential and commercial. Now all of that of course got upended with COVID and the pandemic when we stopped going to offices and started working from home. But another amazing thing happened, which is our carbon footprint dropped in 2020 because we weren't flying and driving and traveling so much. So that was a wonderful sign to show that we could, of course, it's a shame that it took a global pandemic and, you know, millions of dead people around the world to show us this, but it showed us that it's possible, but the overall trend is still upward. Carbon levels are still the highest they've ever been. Right now, they’re hovering at around 420 parts per million. And the last time that carbon levels were that high on earth, it was 2 million years ago and there were trees on the south pole.
So, this is all unprecedented. Everything is unprecedented. One of the questions I get most often is, you know, given the frequency of storms and hurricanes and wildfires, is this the new normal? Is this what we can expect? And my answer is no, we have no idea what to expect. We are freaking out too. Every climate scientist I know is freaking out, the numbers are horrifically bad, and there is no new normal. It's just chaos and unpredictability, but that, you know, that's not the kind of thing that calms people down and reassures them. But that's unfortunately the sad reality of living in the 21st century.
Vidhya Iyer: You talked about the modern mindset based on consumption. I grew up in India where even today there are electricity shortages and load shedding. I was conditioned to switching off the lights and fans every time I left the room, but I have forgotten that practice since I've lived in America for thirty years now, what can we do to change this mindset? Maybe simple PSA Announcements or Public Service Announcements?
Eric Corey Freed: I go back and forth on this idea all of the time, because on the one hand, there are very simple actions that each individual can do that has a huge impact on reducing their footprints, carbon footprints, energy footprints, climate footprint, whatever you want to call it. Very simple things that we should all do that just makes sense. Turning off the light when you leave the room, for example, not letting the water run when you brush your teeth, these seem like simple actions. So, on the one hand, I'm all for it. On the other hand, we've tried for 30 years as a modern environmental movement to change the culture, to get them to care about these things. And they simply don't, you know, the thinking is, well other people can do that.
Vidhya Iyer: Right, right.
Eric Corey Freed: You know, I don't need to, or I don't need to do it all the time. So, this idea that somehow, we are going to solve the world through hoping that everybody gets on board is a flawed plan. It's a dumb plan to begin with, right? We're going to get 230 million Americans or 350 million Americans to all do that. It's not going to work. We just witnessed a year where we can't even get people to agree on wearing masks, knowing that there's a global pandemic. You think you're going to get them to voluntarily turn off lights when they leave a room. And if they feel entitled, it's just not going to happen.
The other aspect of it is the real emissions are coming from really a handful of companies. We know who these companies are. We know their names; we know their websites. We can point to them and they are brilliant in that. Somehow, you're telling me that Chevron and Shell and Texaco. Somehow convinced the entire country that no, no, it's not the oil company's fault, it's your fault for wanting to drive places. You're the one that should feel guilty and bad about yourself. But these companies that are, you know, reaping immense profits, somehow don't need to change. That's been the mindset that's been prevalent for the last 30 years. And that's really what we need to work against, right? If we can change the infrastructure, if we can change the grid, if we can change how we do, you know, do things and redesign the world, then individual actions won't matter.
Vidhya Iyer: So, you're saying hit where the impact is the most, these few companies, which are contributing to, which are contributing the most, try to focus on them, then the smaller issues, which will take a longer time to change people's habit and have an impact.
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah, and what a much better sales pitch that is, right?
Vidhya Iyer: Right.
Eric Corey Freed: Instead of me going to every single person in this country and saying, you need to make a sacrifice because you're a bad person for doing these things. Isn't it a much better argument to say, let's change how we source our energy? Let's change the incentives we give for energy. Let's stop giving money to these companies to destroy the planet. And instead incentivize the things that we want to see happen. It's a much better pitch and also gets us there much faster. You know, that being said, how often have you heard, you know, you should recycle? And you should cut out meatless Mondays? And you should cut out eating meat once a week? I get it and believe me, I do all these things, right. I live in a zero-energy house, that's completely powered by renewable energy. I drive an electric car. We bring bags to the store. We do all those annoying hippie things because I know way too much. And I feel guilty about my actions, but the truth is the system that we've created is broken. And that's what ultimately needs to change. How we power our buildings, how we communicate, how we get from place, all of these things are contributing to this mess. And individual actions will never get us there fast enough in the way that we need in the time that we have left.
Vidhya Iyer: So, let me be a contrarian, right? So, I think individual people, when they come together will have a power to make change.
Eric Corey Freed: Absolutely.
Vidhya Iyer: So even the fact that we are having this conversation, if the individual wasn't onboard, we could never convince the companies. I understand the impact is less, but we have to have individuals, the citizenry thinking about these things who then can pressurize their legislators, the companies from whom they buy and the everyday practice.
Eric Corey Freed: You're absolutely right. Every snowflake contributes to the avalanche, right? But at the same time, every snowflake is somewhat innocent because look at all the other snowflakes, right? So, it's a weird duality that we're talking about, but we need individual actions, but I am past the point of counting on them. I'm past the point of the idea that let's educate everybody and get them on board. So, they all want to hug and sing kumbaya together. It hasn't worked for 30 years. Instead let's really make some systemic changes really throughout our entire infrastructure and really start to transform how we live. And you know, the other part is, in was it 2005 hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans?
Vidhya Iyer: True.
Eric Corey Freed: And I went down there to help along with a lot of other people. And, you know, I went through the lower ninth ward and I saw the flooding and I saw the damage that it did. And then in 2010 was the Deepwater Horizon Explosion, which was the worst man made environmental disaster.
Vidhya Iyer: Right.
Eric Corey Freed: In global history at that point. And then, you know, so here it was. New Orleans got hit with Katrina and then they got hit with another disaster.
Vidhya Iyer: Right.
Eric Corey Freed: And then I was down there again. And I met people at the time that had been through both of these experiences and they were wearing shirts that said, we need more oil. So, climate change fueled these hurricanes that destroyed the city, the search for more fossil fuels, you know, created a crisis that destroyed the city. And yet they're wearing the very shirt of their destroyer at the same time. And when I tried to talk to them and reason with them, it didn't even compute. I didn't have the skills to explain what was wrong with what they were hoping for.
And I've seen this time again, I've seen it in Wyoming with coal miners. I've seen it in West Virginia with coal miners, right? We need to save coal. It's the wrong mindset. What we need to do is think, where do you want to be? Because running oil on an oil rig is a crappy job. It pays well, but it's a crappy job.
Vidhya Iyer: Right.
Eric Corey Freed: You know, being a coal miner is a crappy job, you know. I can give you a job in renewable energy, much faster. Plus, there's only 47,000 coal miners in the whole country anyway. We could easily pay to train and put them into the clean energy economy, which is, you know, 10 times the size and give them better jobs with better health benefits and better pay hopefully. So, I don't get it, right. And people are weird.
Vidhya Iyer: And the thing is, we live in America in a land of plenty. We are very, very fortunate. Lot of the innovations that come are created by scarcity.
Eric Corey Freed: Yes.
Vidhya Iyer: Like in the seventies, you know. My kids ask me what are the carpool pull outs they have on the expressways? You know, and the seventies and early eighties, people used to carpool and go to work. And so, because gasoline was at all an all-time high at that point in time. So, what innovation could motivate people to change or should we just create an artificial scarcity?
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah, It's a great question. You brought up something that I've been doing in my own work with clients, which is mapping out these pain points, mapping out this scarcity. You can't have innovation without understanding these pain points. So, I'll often work with clients and say, how much are you spending on electricity? How much are you spending on steam? How much are you spending on throwing things away? And let's map out those pain points and suddenly they are much more open to innovating those things. Once they, you know, look back and go, oh my gosh, I did not realize how much we're wasting every month on these things. So, pain and innovation go hand in hand, right? One is the catalyst for the other. We don't need to create an artificial scarcity, unfortunately, because we're already experiencing it. We just went through a wildfire season. That was the worst we've ever had nationwide now.
The last decade has shown us that the Atlantic Hurricanes have broken record after record, you know, 2020 is now tied for the hottest year on record, 2021 is not done yet, but it will be one of the five hottest years on record. I can already say that with confidence, unfortunately. So, we're already at a scarcity due to the climate crisis. We are the proverbial frog in the boiling pot of water. And we're slowly realizing holy moly, this is much worse than we thought. And so now we've kind of sacrificed all the time that we had to make a proper plan. Now we need to make some very hard decisions in a very short period of time. Thomas Friedman said, “We can either have a hard decade or a hard century.” And I really think that's kind of the choice that's ahead of us and historically humans, especially Americans, but humans in general are not very good at making hard decisions, right?
Vidhya Iyer: Right.
Eric Corey Freed: Usually, we just kind of put it off and hope that it'll work itself out. And it doesn't.
Vidhya Iyer: So, when we talk about energy consumption, we talk about gas, electricity, and oil. And in terms of the resources, we talk about water, other natural resources, where do you think we should focus our energies on?
Eric Corey Freed: This is already happening. And when we talk about energy, we don't talk about natural gas, electricity, and oil. We really, you know, we in the building industry, we talk about in terms of natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, because we're not using oil to power buildings, right? We're using oil to power transportation through refined gasoline. So, we think of in terms of that, the beautiful part is we have distribution grid called the utility grid that distributes electricity everywhere. And whether you're pumping in coal-based electricity or solar based electricity, it's all dumping in the grid. That wasn't by design, it just luckily worked out that way. And so, what we've been doing is, we've been having a massive push for electrification. Meaning, let's stop burning things inside buildings to heat water, to heat air, and to cook things. So, you've seen in just the State of California, there's a hundred different cities that have passed or considering passing electrification bills that would essentially ban natural gas inside buildings. In part, because it's dumb that we're burning, you know, methane emitting gas anyway.
And in part, it's crazy that we're still burning things inside buildings where people eat and sleep because it can cause fires. But in part, just because of the carbon story, we need create a more of a demand for electric, electrification that will be powered by solar and wind, hopefully. So, you're seeing that take place in California and now other States are now considering similar bills, including New York. This is the kind of the push that we need. We need to essentially mandate these things, and these are not going to go away. So, if suddenly you're not allowed to, you know, boil water all day long in order to create hot water. And you're going to have to use electricity. That's going to drive demand for cheaper form of electricity, including solar and solar is now the cheapest form of electricity out there, even cheaper than coal. So, all of this has been a very slow-moving chess game over the last three decades with very slow-moving pieces. But I feel like we're finally getting there and seeing the end game.
Vidhya Iyer: So, we want buildings to be Lead Certified. What is Lead is Lead Certified?
Eric Corey Freed: Leed is a green building rating system that was created by the U.S. Green Building Council. It's the most popular system, certainly here in north America, but now it's spun-out flavors and variations all over the world. And in one sense, it's a great system and I was an early proponent of it. And I'm what's called a Leed fellow. And there's only like 300 of us in the whole world that have, you know, really committed to doing this. But Leed is not the end all be all of sustainability. You know, we're doing dozens of buildings now. Where we're going well beyond this rating system to do net zero energy buildings, which is a building that produces as much energy as it consumes. We're doing net zero carbon buildings, which is a building that accounts for all the carbon that went into making it and try and offset that. We're doing net zero water buildings, which collects and stores and cleans as much water as it consumes.
You know, we're doing some pretty wild cutting-edge stuff that goes well beyond Lead. But if you're looking to get started with green buildings, Leed is the perfect place to do that, right? It's a checklist. And depending on the number of points you rack up on the checklist, it gives you a certain level of certification. And, you know, we do it with a lot of clients who they've never built a green building before. They'd never considered energy efficiency before, but they're realizing that the old way of building is too expensive for them. So, let's find ways to make a high-performance energy efficient building that'll save the money. And as we like to tell people doing a Lead building, doesn't cost you money. It saves you money in the long run because it immediately starts to pay itself back in utility savings and occupant satisfaction and all those other benefits.
Vidhya Iyer: So how much more has a percent would a Leed or even a, I don't want to call it Leed. The more evolved form of a sustainable green building cost more than the traditional way of building as a percent of the whole overall project cost or per square feet?
Eric Corey Freed: If you, do it right, it doesn't cost you any more upfront and will also save you money in its operational savings every month, if you do it right.
Vidhya Iyer: How do you do it right?
Eric Corey Freed: A lot of people still don't do it, right? They'll take, here's a building. And here's the same building where we've tacked on some sustainability feature. Well, of course the building that you've tacked something on, it's going to cost more. But instead, I just take a step back and say, well wait a minute. What if we, when we're designing that building, we orient the whole thing to the sun.
Vidhya Iyer: Right.
Eric Corey Freed: We realize that the materials that are south are going to get a lot of sun. And do we want to welcome that sun in to heat the building in the winter? Do we want to store that sun into material and form of thermal, mass and heat? Do we want to have air pass through it? Natural ventilation? Do we want to wrap the building in an envelope that's energy efficient? And so, if we start to consider these things right from the outset, it doesn't cost you more. It gives you a better building for the same price. That's much cheaper to operate, and that has all these other benefits. So, I no longer sell clients on sustainability. I sell clients on the benefits that sustainability brings. I start with the why, right? I can, you know, if I'm building you a school, I can build you a school that has higher test scores for students. If I'm building your hospital, I can build you one that has higher patient recovery outcomes, higher staff satisfaction. If I'm building an office, I can build you an office that has higher productivity among the employees. What are those things worth to you? And then we design to those outcomes and we end up with a green building. I think I've evolved to the point where I no longer need to convince them to go with Lead or go with sustainability. I'm just selling them on a better building.
Vidhya Iyer: How do your buildings increase productivity?
Eric Corey Freed: Oh, well, this is kind of the amazing part. If you give people natural light, if you give people views, if you give them access to nature and natural materials through what's called biophilic design. If you give them fresh air, they do really well in those things. We found in an office and we've all experienced this, right. After lunch, you know, you go out and you have your big burrito or whatever. And then you come back to the office and by two o'clock, three o'clock, everybody starts drooping. Well, that's not really the food. I mean, we always blame it on the food, but it's not the food. As much as you're digesting, your bodies are emitting more CO2. So, the office starts to fill up with carbon dioxide. And now we track these carbon dioxide levels. And we found that if they go above a thousand parts per million, inside that your cognitive ability declines.
In other words, you're suffocating yourself and you're slowly putting yourself to sleep.
Vidhya Iyer: Wow.
Eric Corey Freed: So, we do is, we have this little, it's a $65 sensor. It's nothing. I have one over there. It's this little sensor that tracks CO2, and if CO2 gets near a thousand parts per million, we kick on the fans and flood the building with fresh air. And everybody suddenly perks up like a flower in the sun, because they need it. Your bodies do different things throughout different times a day. And the building should react to your own physiology. We've discovered this in hospitals, your blood pressure changes throughout the day, regardless of the stress around you, your blood pressure is different in the morning than it is at night. That's just a fact, right? It's kind of the beauty of our physiology. And so now we're designing buildings to anticipate this by changing the lighting and the color temperature of the lighting by changing the shading and the view that they get to anticipate these physiological behaviors, we're getting it down to such a science that it's really quite remarkable. And there's a whole field now called Building Science and Biophilia that studies all these effects.
Vidhya Iyer: Wow. So, I had the opportunity to volunteer at a nonprofit and a very, very remote village in Southern India and the trees….t was on a hill arch. It used to be covered with trees, but deforestation was so much, it was like a mud hill, but the nonprofit was very progressive. All the structures that they built, they built exactly the way you were talking about. The summer temperatures.. near 100 degrees there, but the way they have the buildings oriented, the way the wind flows through the windows, which are left open, it's a hundred degrees outside. The minute you step inside the building. It's like 78 degrees, which is completely bearable with, you know, overhead fans.
Eric Corey Freed: No, you have to remember. We only have had air conditioning for a hundred years. We've only had elevators for a hundred years. And basically in two and a half generations, we've completely disconnected ourselves from the climate and from nature. And the truth is that for a much longer time before that we built buildings that didn't have air conditioning, didn't need it. Used the natural cycles of the sun and the thermal mass of buildings and the natural funnel of ventilation to heat and cool our buildings pretty well. You know, the caveman didn't have air conditioners either. Why did they go into caves? Because the thermal mass in the caves kept the temperature pretty stable throughout the year. So, we had this innate understanding of this that we had forgotten. And I, you know, I'm in a weird position as an architect because on the one hand, I'm old and I'm old enough to have worked with a lot of these, you know, a lot of my mentors were these old, passive solar architect people that knew how to orient a building to the sun and take advantage of these things. And then on the other side of me is this generation of computer architects that draw everything in CAD and don't really understand what they're drawing. And a lot of my students are like this, they don't really understand the physics of the material. So, I have them spend a lot of time with the material. If I take a brick and put it out in the sun, it's going to store up heat all day and at night, when it gets cold, that brick can keep you warm. We need to get back a little bit of that and understand the physicality of our materials.
Vidhya Iyer: So, what about Greenwashing?
Eric Corey Freed: Greenwashing is inevitable. It's always going to be there. I'd like to think that people's BS detectors are good enough that they can see through it. I used to do this bit in my talks where I would show a bunch of really blatantly Greenwashed ads. And, you know, they always had a, there was always like a picture of a hippie hugging a rainbow or a tree that was smiling, or, you know, rainbows coming out of oil pumps. It was always some weird imagery that was, I would think obviously bad Greenwashing, but you know, I think also manufacturers companies have matured a bit. You know, you had basically companies in two camps, you had ones that were blatantly Greenwashing. And then you had companies that were scared, you know, scared to get scrutinized. So, they didn't want to even tout the few sustainability things they were doing.
So, you got a lot of people that were silent. I think now it seems to have evolved where the companies realize no one's expecting you to be perfect. It's much better for you to say, here's where we are today. Here's where we want to be going. And that's okay. Just recently, just a few weeks ago, Netflix, which I think all of us have a relationship with. Netflix announced their sustainability plans. And it was probably the most well-written sustainability announcement I've ever seen from a company.
Vidhya Iyer: Really?
Eric Corey Freed: In fact, I shared it on social media because I was saying, now this is how you write a corporate statement. There was no Greenwashing whatsoever. It was, here's what we're doing. Here's the challenge that's ahead of us. Here's what we're struggling with. Here's how we're trying to overcome it. Here's where we're headed. And then I looked and it was written by a friend of mine, Dr. Emmett Stewart, who's a PhD. And of course, I was like, oh, of course she wrote that. It was, you know, she's brilliant. And it makes total sense now, but it was, you know, if you're really nerdy about this stuff like I am, go look it up on Netflix website and you can check it out. But it was both humble and clear and actionable and had real timelines. It didn't have this arbitrary, eh, by 2050, we'll do this. It said, by next year, by 2022, we're doing this. By 2025, we're doing this. By 2030, we'll have this. It was great, and I think more companies could follow that lead.
Vidhya Iyer: You're trained as an architect. When didn't you go to school? Not to date you.
Eric Corey Freed: I went to school in the, let's just say the eighties.
Vidhya Iyer: Okay.
Eric Corey Freed: I went to school in the beautiful, wonderful eighties where I had a purple hair and a long black trench coat. And I was, you know, I was a weird guy. I still am a weird guy, but I was a weird guy. And as the eighties, and I went to school, knowing that I wanted to be an architect. In other words, I'd known since I was a little kid that I wanted to be an architect. So, by the time I got to college, in my mind I've been waiting for this moment for 10 years, since I was eight years old, I wanted to be an architect. And now I'm finally, I graduated high school. I'm finally at college. I'm like, good. Now I can finally begin, and I was raring to go.
And so, I was the annoying kid that was asking a million questions and not really liking the answers I was getting from the professors, right. Why do we do it that way? That seems dumb. And so, the answers I kept getting was, well, we've always done it this way. And that just really bothered me. So, it sent me looking for alternatives and I found, we didn't call it green building back then. I found this group of weird hippie architects that were, you know, really understanding sun and wind and materiality and building essentially off-grid buildings.
Vidhya Iyer: You talk about hippies, affectionately, right?
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah. I've never been much of a hippie, but I'm hippie adjacent, right. I have a lot of hippies be friends.
Vidhya Iyer: So, were you taught any of the green practices in school, then?
Eric Corey Freed: Not in the eighties, no. I had a lot of great professors at school. I don't want to diminish. I went to Temple University in Philadelphia. There are a lot of great professors there and some of them were still there actually. And you know, in their defense, they didn't know what to do with me. I used to argue with George, who was the Dean, we used to have massive arguments, knock down, blow out arguments about stuff, but he was coming from a place of love. I mean, he was not a jerk about it. And I don't even know if he'd even remember now, whatever, it's been 30 years later. So, I had these professors that were really well-meaning, but I was restless, that was part of the problem. And so, I basically started reaching out to former students of Frank Lloyd Wright.
So, Frank Lloyd Wright died 10 years before I was born. And I thought, well, shoot, that's a dead end. And then I realized, well, his former apprentices had moved on and were doing things. There was no email back then. So, I started writing them letters and they would write me letters back and I would send them, you know, like copies of my drawings and they would give me critiques. And then I started working for some of them and getting mentored by them, and that changed everything. Having good mentors is the best thing that anybody can do at any age, who wants to make positive changes in the world, right. Knowing that you're not alone is a powerful thing, and that's what it did for me. So, you know, I'm 19-20 years old and here I have this network supporting mentors and it changed everything and it showed me that anything was possible. And so, I could explore these ideas freely, knowing that I had a support system in place. And then, you know, that helps.
Vidhya Iyer: So, do you teach now?
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah.
Vidhya Iyer: You're a professor. And you teach architecture.. where?
Eric Corey Freed: So, I teach at Boston Architectural College, which is in Boston. And yet I live across the country in Portland Oregon, which is strange, but I do it online, but it's a great school, and the students are amazing. And I teach the Masters of Sustainable Design Thesis. So, I get the students at the very end when they're looking to change the world. And so, I'm very lucky that they let me do that. And this, you know, I pushed them outside of their comfort zone quite a bit, but I want them to make the world a better place. So, I have them use their thesis to do that.
Vidhya Iyer: So, during the thesis, do they come up with creative solutions?
Eric Corey Freed: Oh gosh, yeah. Here's how every thesis student operates. They see themselves as coming to the end of their study. So, they see it as an ending. I don't, I see it as a beginning, you're about to graduate and finally start your sustainability career. That's how I see it. So, when I talked to them, I say, what do you want to do for your thesis? And they usually say something goofy, like, well, I'm really into food, or I'm really into water, or I'm really into solar. And I go, okay, well, that's not a thesis. What about food? Or wind or water? So, you know, and ultimately, I pushed them to the point where I say, what drives you totally crazy? What drives you totally mad about these things? And again, that pain point becomes the opportunity for innovation. So, for example, this semester, right now. I have a student and she, you know, I said, what do you want to do for your thesis?
And she said, why? I hate the carbon footprint of food. I want to do something with food. Well, that simple start has led to she's offering a carbon smart cookbook. She's calling a climate smart cookbook that she's trying to get published. And in it, it shows you how to make substitutions in your recipes that greatly reduce your carbon footprint. And so, it's as much an exploration around infographics and communication as it is about carbon. And it's awesome, I've, you know, I had another student, she's an architect in Seattle and I said, what do you want to do for your thesis? And she said, well, I want to do refugee housing. And I said, okay, well go look and see what's missing. And when she looked, she said, well, there are a lot of people doing refugee housing. I don't know what I would contribute to it.
And I said, well, what is not being serviced? What's missing? And as she looked at it, she said, well, we give refugees these houses. We don't give them any services to acclimate to American society. So, we kind of throw people into these houses in the United States. And they ended up starting fires in their living room because they don't know not to do that. So, she ended up instead of designing housing, instead she designed a book that was a giant infographic written in multiple languages. That explained how you acclimate to American society. Here's where you get medicine, if you're sick. It was a full thing, and then she partnered with Microsoft who translated it into 14 different languages. And so, she started with Arabic and Spanish, and now it's in a whole bunch of languages and then launched that as a nonprofit to essentially help refugees acclimate to the United States. And that all started with, I think I want to design housing, right? So, it's amazing where these things take us, but that's the joy of teaching.
Vidhya Iyer: So, talking about innovation, one of the main ingredients used in almost all construction is cement, and cement is considered one of the most destructive material on earth. Do they call it cement here or do they call it concrete?
Eric Corey Freed: So, concrete is the mix. And Portland, cement is the catalyst, you know, the glue inside. So concrete is actually cement, sand, aggregate, water.
Vidhya Iyer: Okay.
Eric Corey Freed: But the cement industry is the one that is the problem.
Vidhya Iyer: Is problematic because of the carbon dioxide that it releases?
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah, if the production of cement was a country, I think it's the eighth largest emitter in the world. So, it's pretty bad. Some 8 to 12% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the manufacturer of cement. It's the single largest industry point load of emissions that we have. And unfortunately, it's very hard to build buildings without concrete. And concrete's main ingredient is cement.
Vidhya Iyer: Are there any innovations in substituting those? or I read somewhere there were these concrete production methods, which took back the carbon dioxide.
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah, so that's the amazing part. There is a whirlwind of innovations going on right now, and we're using all of them in any way that we can. So, there's just the basic idea of, well what if we make better concrete? So, there's companies like CarbonCure and Carbonsix and so on that are essentially finding ways to inject CO2 back into the concrete. So, concrete becomes a carbon sequestering, essentially storage vault, which is great. And then CarbonCure just won the Carbon Sequestrian XPRIZE just recently. And I encourage everybody to go, just check out what they've been doing. So that's one way, the other way is what if we just use less concrete? So, we're using this stuff called bubble deck. They look like giant golf balls, and I guess that's what they are, but they're basically hollow recycled plastic spheres that we stick into the concrete. So that way you just use less concrete.
You're just filling it up with these big giant golf balls. It's really bizarre, but it really works, right. We can essentially eliminate, you know, half the concrete that we use with less mass. So that's another way, the third way is what if we use something else entirely. And so, to that end, we're using a lot of zero carbon materials, including one called Mass Timber and Mass Timber is essentially engineered wood that is made into very, very strong beams that are as strong as steel. And we're building the entire structural part of the building out of wood now. So, what was a concrete or steel building? Now can become a wood building that has virtually no embodied carbon from its manufacturer. And the best part is, is that those beams are essentially storing carbon because that's what trees do. And when the building is taken down, those beams could be reused just like a steel beam could. So, it's our pathway to creating, you know, very scalable zero carbon buildings by using Mass Timber. But it doesn't work on every building type. It's still difficult to do it in a hospital because of fire code and whatnot, but we're building a lot of buildings out of wood now that normally we wouldn't have in the past.
Vidhya Iyer: So, this is engineered wood?
Eric Corey Freed: Very engineered wood. It's not just the wood. Yeah, it doesn't burn the way you think of wood does. It's, you know, laminated layers of wood like plywood, but manufactured into a beam called a glue lam. Glue laminated beam, and it is very strong and very fire resistant. So, it creates a very beautiful building too. I mean, you're seeing all this exposed wood as the structure, it's much prettier than concrete. It also creates a much lighter building, which we initially didn't count on. So, you know, if we had a building that was going to be concrete and now it's going to be out of Mass Timber, the building feels differently. It has different acoustics, it has a different vibration, a different resonance. As an industry getting better at understanding that too, but you're seeing a lot of Mass Timber here on the west coast, especially in the Pacific Northwest. I live in Portland, Oregon, which is the Mass Timber capital of America. Vancouver's doing a lot with it. Toronto is starting to do a lot with it. There are amazing things going on in North America with Mass Timber. And I imagine you all hear a lot more about it very soon.
Vidhya Iyer: So, you're okay with using wood?
Eric Corey Freed: I'm okay with using wood, but still the same questions apply. Where are we getting the wood from? And how was it harvested? And how was it farmed? And, you know, is it being replaced? If you're clear-cutting wood to make it, then it's not. And so, like everything else, there's good wood and not so good wood. And so, we just ask those questions. If I'm, you know, importing wood from China, it's probably not great wood, but if I'm harvesting it from sustainably managed forest in British Columbia, well, that's a lot better. And truly renewable, if you think about it.
Vidhya Iyer: One of the key ways to cut back any resource consumption or over consumption is to change how we use it. Have there been any changes in design techniques using more physics to reduce the amount of materials that you use?
Eric Corey Freed: Yeah. So, we're doing all of those things and more.
Vidhya Iyer: I see a smile.
Eric Corey Freed: Well, really trying to bring this into as a science. And so, we're modeling the building before we're building it and by modeling it, we can track the anticipated energy performance. We can really model different alternatives to see which building weighs less or uses less material. We can really design it to a point of, you know, pretty dynamic analysis. But now we're just starting to get into what's called Parametric Modeling where essentially, we can use software. And depending on what parameters we put in, we can say, generate a hundred different facades that meet these parameters and the computer can kind of spit these out. And then we can kind of go through them and eliminate some and narrow it down quite a bit. And then from that, really start to do a level of analysis we never thought possible. So instead of just building big blocky beams everywhere, we can use this parametric analysis to essentially 3d print a beam. That is just the structure that you need. Like, it's really kind of incredible. So, you get these very organic looking things, but they're really designed through mathematics and these parameters that we set and that's kind of the next wave. Next generation of iteration, we're going to see in sustainability. Doing more with less, but to a very scientific level.
Vidhya Iyer: So, talking about consumer and business behaviors, right. Ultimately, it's a behavior, it’s a mindset. How much influence do Governments have by incentivizing or penalizing, and what incentives should the Government give?
Eric Corey Freed: Governments, move entire markets and they send market signals. So, on the one hand, there are regulations that we've had for years. Think about the Environmental Protection Agency, The Clean water act, The Clean air act and how much that has changed things for the better for everybody. On the other hand, if you make a regulation, you then need to enforce it. And as we saw in the 2008 financial crisis, there were plenty of regulations on the books, that wasn't the issue. It's just nobody bothered to enforce these things. And the banks were a little naughty with how they did things. So, there's a balance, but then there's also having a vision and President Biden had four pillars coming into his administration, and one of them was fighting the climate crisis. Well, that was amazing. Just that one of his four pillars, given all the other problems going on, including a pandemic, which was one of the other pillars. We made in the top four, so that was great. And it immediately sent a resounding message to the investor class market, to the home builder market, to the developer market, that this is going to be the priority. And this is going to be our focus. Then ensuing, it's been a hundred days now, officially today, but you know, for the next four years, he is sending a signal saying we are going to put a price on carbon. We are going to cut our carbon emissions in half by 2030, which is by the way in eight and a half years. And it's not even enough, but it's the boldest plan that's come out of this Government ever. And all of these things have been wonderful. We've had more action in climate due to Government announcement in the last three months than we've had in the previous three years, and maybe even in the previous 10.
So, it's been remarkable. And for people like me that are out there fighting to build zero carbon high performance buildings, it makes my job easier, right. We have clients that, oh, I heard Biden say this, or I saw, you know, I saw a TV commercial about that, or I heard this company did this. Right now, we have quarter of the fortune 500 companies have carbon neutrality plans in place. Virtually all of them have net zero energy plans in place. And more than the fortune 500, every company seems to have now sustainability staff in place. So, we've gotten to a place where the Government sends market signals. The market reacts very clearly, and then it moves. It doesn't move as quickly as I'd like, of course not, but I'm an inpatient dreamer type. So, it's never going to move as quickly as I'd like it to. But, I'm more optimistic now than I certainly have been in the last four years and probably in the last decade, really. So, it's a great time to be alive in that. We're seeing a lot of very clear indications that we're heading where we need to be
Headed.
Closing
Vidhya Iyer: On that inspiring note. Thank you so much, Eric, for coming on Mindful Businesses.
Eric Corey Freed: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Vidhya Iyer: You're listening to Mindful Businesses with Vidhya Iyer. If you're the creator of a mindful brand or would like to recommend a mindful brand to be featured on our show, send an email to info@mindfulbusinessespodcast.com, subscribe and listen to us on your favorite podcast listening app. Remember to rate and review us on Google or Apple Podcasts. To learn more about this and other episodes. Check out our website, mindfulbusinessespodcast.com. If you learn to think, or two from this episode, share it with one friend. This is Vidhya Iyer with Mindful Businesses.
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