July 1, 2022
Odeh Engineers is excited to announce that we have made the SE2050 commitment. We have pledged to support the SE 2050 Challenge and transform the practice of structural engineering in a way that is holistic, firm-wide, project based, and data-driven by prioritizing reduction of embodied carbon, through innovative designs and the use of less impactful structural materials.
In 2019, the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) formally issued the challenge to structural engineers to understand, reduce and ultimately eliminate embodied carbon in their projects by 2050 and in December 2019, the SEI Board of Governors (of which David J. Odeh was a member) endorsed the challenge. At Odeh Engineers we then asked ourselves what we could do to be better stewards of the environment.
Over the past two years, we have taken the time to educate ourselves individually and as a company by participating in CLF workshops and attending industry specific presentations to better understand the sustainability related shortcomings of our projects. When possible, we’ve used the available industry resources to help our clients understand the environmental impacts of the different structural systems being considered for a project. In that time, we’ve seen the resources and tools continue to grow and develop from niche to mainstream and we’re incredibly excited about this trajectory.
The availability of educational resources and industry wide adoption of some best practices has also given us comfort that we can start to enact real change in our projects. We have always embraced the use of sustainable construction materials, but we also believe that using structural materials as efficiently as possible is the best way to reduce structural costs while also reducing embodied carbon. To help drive change, we’ve also been hard at work rewriting our specifications to eliminate prescriptive language that could increase the carbon footprint of our projects without providing benefit to the project. We have also begun to require environmental product declarations be submitted for all of our projects.
The path to a more sustainable future is not a problem that any of us can solve individually so we must work together to achieve these goals. Joining this commitment program provides us a forum to work with our peers to share resources and data so that we can all make more informed decisions. As part of the commitment, we will continue to not only pursue education for our sustainability community and our company as a whole, but also to engage with our clients and educate them on the impacts of their decisions. The program will provide resources to help us not only implement our goals, but also provide a forum for data sharing in our joint mission. This effort will lead to better benchmarking data and ultimately better accountability for the materials that comprise our buildings.
We hope that you will join us in working towards a more sustainable future. If you have questions about our SE 2050 commitment or how we can help your project reach its sustainability goals, please contact us.
To learn more about SE2050, please visit:
