Embodied Carbon in Vermont Residential Retrofits
Customers who want to make their homes more energy efficient typically work with their contractors to choose home insulation materials. Their collective decisions involve cost effectiveness, durability of the materials, their regional availability, and how appropriate they are for the project from a building science perspective. Global environmental impacts have now also entered decision making, although there is some market confusion about what factors should be considered. This Efficiency Vermont Research and Development Program project sought to streamline customers' and contractors' decision making of global environmental impacts by deriving a single point of comparison for a wide variety of materials. Efficiency Vermont and its partners for this project, New Frameworks and Vermont Integrated Architecture, have now filled a gap in the data on the embodied-carbon contribution of weatherization materials in Vermont’s retrofit projects.