Members of the team for the 850-ft-tall Salesforce Tower in Chicago say they achieved a 19% reduction in the embodied carbon in the building, compared to a typical high-rise, by minimizing office sizes, maximizing structural efficiency and specifying lower-carbon-footprint materials, such as high-strength steel, reinforcing steel and concrete. In doing so, they wrote the book on office tower EC reduction—for all to use.
The 1.2-million-sq-ft Salesforce is the first project of structural engineer Magnusson Klemencic Associates and developer Hines to demonstrate the effectiveness of their 55-page Embodied Carbon Reduction Guidebook. The Hines-MKA guide is an outcome of MKA’s work on the free-to-use Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), which relies on environmental product declarations from materials suppliers.