Typical building materials, especially concrete, window trim, flooring materials, and insulation, use energy intensive manufacturing processes resulting in large embodied energy and carbon footprint. While alternatives are beginning to become more available, they tend to cost more and not last as long, while still creating hazardous waste at end of life. The prefabricated and modular housing movement is improving access to homes on an unprecedented scale, however, they do not utilize green materials and are often not designed to be fit for their location, making them less efficient overall and thus more costly for heating and cooling. Buildings account for 40% of energy consumption in the United States; we believe there is significant room for improvement.

Our Materials Selection for Eco-Design module empowers students to quantify the metrics that make a product green: embodied energy, embodied water, CO2 emissions, geopolitical risk, and ethical sourcing of materials at each phase of its life cycle. Our goal is to increase transparency in purchasing decisions and allow for more agency in material and product selection for projects or during product redesign, so that everyone can make green and socially just decisions. Students can apply this knowledge toward building materials while learning tools and techniques of the trade in our Green Building module. Activities in these areas provide an educational experience that will help with “creating green minds.”

Checkout some of our ongoing projects in this area:

• Pallet Palace: students are designing and building a unique tiny house that incorporates reclaimed materials in the modular construction of a creative space that can also be used as a test bed for novel reclaimed and other green materials.
• The UCSC division of LEED Lab provides students experience in modeling new and already built construction for energy and water use, among other green building practices that make up the LEED rating system. This project is now ramping up due to a new collaboration with the City of Santa Cruz to perform energy modeling in a newly proposed Net Positive Resilient All-Electric Affordable Housing at the METRO Center.
• UCSC will participate in the solar decathlon design challenge, where multidisciplinary teams design and build a zero energy building. Our team will be working in Riverside, California