Chris and Lars both cut their teeth in the straw bale community over 20 years ago and have gone on to have outsized influences in the effort to bring natural building further into the mainstream building world. We asked them to talk with us about building code and its influence on their work. Lars, in Denmark, is dealing with a new building code built on quantifying how much carbon is emitted from new building materials. And Chris, in Canada, is working with multiple governments and committees just trying to get embodied energy into any codes at all.
The Last Straw: Thank you both for agreeing to sit down with us. We were hoping to start this conversation by hearing from you both about building codes and how they are impacting your work. Lars, part of what inspired this conversation are the CO2 limits introduced in the new National Strategy for Sustainable Construction in Denmark, could you explain briefly what the strategy is and when it’s coming into effect?
Lars: Yeah, the strategy was agreed on and published in the spring of 2021. It includes 21 initiatives with ongoing implementation. The initiative that introduced CO2-limits came into effect on January 1st 2023. It has this stepping strategy where we have a present code and they are announcing now what will be introduced in the future. So this year it applies to new buildings larger than 1000 square meters, next year it will be down to 500 square meters and so on. And it says buildings of that size are only allowed to emit 12.5 kg of carbon per square meter of building area per year. The thing is the average carbon emissions per square meter of new houses in Denmark is 9.6 kg. So why do you have a limit that is higher than the current average? I guess it’s the game of “follow the money.” Of course there are some big players out there for whom this will be a bit of disruption, so it’s a compromise they have made in their V.I.P. groups or their secret societies [laughs]. I have no idea how it really happened but it doesn’t make the most sense if you want to change things quickly. But from our perspective the introduction of CO2 limits is still a huge step from having never considered embodied energy in building materials.
Last year, when the code was passed, it introduced the concept of LCAs (Life Cycle Assessments) and EPDs (Environmental Product Declarations) and embodied energy as the agreed upon tools within the building sector. There were no limits when it first passed, but suddenly the whole sector was in full gear, doing further education learning about LCAs and EPDs. And now this year they are starting the squeeze. Is that the way they do it in Canada and in the US?
Chris: It happens a bit in Canada. Right now we have what’s called the energy step code.
There’s today’s limit but you already know what the next 10 years of progression looks like. And there are some jurisdictions that will reward somebody for being a step or two ahead of what the minimum is today. That’s how I’m always trying to frame the embodied carbon piece too. We already figured out how to do this and how to introduce it well on the energy side of the code. So let’s just follow that map in the main building code. People like to know what’s coming and I totally get it.
I think I’ve been at some of the secret society tables that you’re talking about on the Canadian side and it’s not so secret. You’ve got a whole industry that’s resistant to and scared of change. Regulators are always trying to make people comfortable enough that they stay on board and don’t fight it. I get the feeling that you really need buy-in when it’s easy in order to aim for those high levels. It’s not gonna fly if you have to learn all this stuff and hit these really ambitious targets by next year. It just doesn’t ever go that way. But I think the step code thing is a great way to do it.
Lars: Yeah in Denmark, the step approach is really effective because it totally disrupts the parts of the commercial sector that choose not to follow it. The new Strategy is now framing the whole way of talking about embodied carbon among engineers and architects. You know there’s always disruptions, but I must say that the intensity of awareness increasing in the last three years has been exhilaratingly awesome to follow.
Another initiative launched recently in Denmark is a project called The Reduction Roadmap, which is a part of the new 4>1 Planet partnership. The Reduction Roadmap has pulled together a crew of skilled people and said, “Okay, the Paris agreement has a target limit but, because we have never acted sufficiently on that, the target is out of sync with reality.” So instead they have made a calculation tool based on reaching the original target. Right now the slope to get to that target is like this [makes a semi-steep angle with his arm] and the longer it takes, the steeper it gets, or the greater the need for change you might say. For example, in Denmark at the moment the Reduction Roadmap says we need to build with 2.5 kg of carbon emissions per square meter of building area per year but on average we build with 9.6 kg. We are losing time and lagging further behind. Before too long we will need to build with only 0.4 kg to reach the target, which is an almost insurmountable challenge. Meanwhile the limit being introduced in the building code is 12.5 kg.
Chris: The targets that you’re talking about; is the notion that Denmark has a carbon budget of this much [gestures] and buildings are this much [smaller
Chris (left) and Lars (right) on our trans-Atlantic video call
gesture] of that budget and so every square meter of building has this much of that target?
Lars: Yeah
Chris: That’s such an interesting notion. A few people that I’ve talked to in the Canadian government really love that idea but I don’t think it will fly here. We still have a whole segment of the population that’s in complete climate denial. But I think our federal government sort of understands that budget and one of the things I’m hoping to do is figure out if they’ve looked at buildings and projected building amounts and if that budget exists. It would be really great to just start using it anyway. Even if it’s not gonna be in the code or going to be in any formal documents, it would be great just to start socializing like this is what we’ve got left, you know, let’s try to work within that.
Lars: Yeah. I also think the cool thing about measuring carbon emissions that way is how transparent and terribly honest it is in a way. Every day it gets worse.
Chris: Yeah [nodding]. In Canada, the current government at the end of last year announced that by 2030 our building codes will all be based on emissions and they’re actually both operational and embodied emissions with no talk yet of limits or how they’re going to do that. But it feels like it’s coming here slowly. Honestly, the conversations in the US don’t lead me to think that there will be a code style intervention anytime soon. But that said, there are some really great things going on. From the Canadian perspective, it feels like at a government level the US isa bit hopeless but then when I’m actually working there, there are so many really great organizations.
So much of the progress there happens one step away from the government and in this weird realm of foundations and private organizations. It’s a very odd and different place which has sprung up because the government hasn’t been and probably won’t be a leader. So you have this whole other ecosystem of organizations attempting to take on that leadership. And sometimes because they’re not the government, they can do better and more interesting things but also they can’t force people to do things. So it’s a really different scenario.
Lars: It’s also hard to imagine that America would conceptually be able to do this too because half of the country is in denial about climate change and because money speaks so loud there.
What do you think Chris, how can it be that some companies know everything and they don’t give a fuck?
Chris: Yeah. I don’t know if it’s just that they see that their business model can continue for X more number of years without any wavering, and so they won’t. I think there’s as many approaches at the corporate level as there are at the private level: from companies that kind of see the writing on the wall and want to be first into the space, to others who are like, “well if we just hold back we’re making lots of money, we’ll wait to see what emerges and jump in closer to the end”. Just a question about the LCA stuff in Denmark: Are they accounting for biogenic carbon and having that show up as a negative number? Is that built into that system?
Lars: Yes and no. According to their calculations the only benefit is that the product is created by photosynthesis, and requires minimal processing energy. The Strategy uses a +1/-1 calculation approach, which requires that we assume biogenic materials are burned every 50 years. So if you have a 100 year old house then you have to buy the product two times and transport it two times and so on. It’s clearly a load of bollocks.
Chris: That’s what I’m going to be facing because I’m on both this ASHRAE committee here and the ResNet one and the conversation will very soon move to how are we measuring, and if so how are we weighting, biogenic carbon storage? I was kind of hoping that in Denmark you were giving it that extra weight of not having to burn it in the calculations because I’d like to be able to point to as many examples as I can, but I guess not Denmark.
Lars: Yeah it’s bollocks because everything with phase D is guesswork, right? The building will
be taken apart at some point. And in the future, let’s say in 50 years, will we burn biogenic materials? Of course not! It’ll be illegal. You’ll go straight to jail. So how come we are still having to burn it in our calculations?
We are actually making designs for disassembly now too. For a long time it was just a nice idea, but now it’s realistic.
Chris: We did that in 2017. We built a house in Peterborough, we took it down, we put it up at a design show in Toronto, we took it down, and we put it up for an owner and reused everything; all the interior finishes and exterior finishes. The PV is glued to the roof so it moves with the metal panels.
Zero house by the Endeavor Centre was built and taken apart three times.
It was fully disassemble-able and reusable. When we did it there was a bunch of thinking that went into the first round of planning but in the end we did this with no funding, no R&D, zero budget. If you go into the project thinking about how it will come apart, it’s not that hard to plan so that it does, and then the pieces really are reusable again. We actually got the building to be really airtight on its third construction. So there’s no degradation of the performance of the building or anything for having banged around on trucks a few times. Why would you ever smash down a house ever again? Why is this not just a standard? Every part of this can be disassembled and reused.
Lars: You built it three times?
Chris: Yeah
Lars: And there’s someone living in it now?
Chris: Hopefully, unless it fell down and crushed them [nervous laughter], but I don’t think so.
Lars: wow
Chris: As a sort of interesting spiral back to The Last Straw and straw bale builders: Seeing you
in the role you’re in now and also watching other people who started in the hand built/straw bale world 20 plus years ago; I’m realizing that the cohort of people who went through the early days of straw bale, and probably other natural material stuff too, ended up having to be our own designers, engineers, construction companies, material sourcers. We had to know enough about all of that to navigate everything.
I feel like we’re very well placed right now. The world needs these climate building solutions and really nobody in the building world has any idea how to get there except this very weird small handful of people who have been doing this thing. And because of the way we’ve had to do it, you know how to talk to an architect, you know how to talk to an engineer, a code person, a farmer, a material supplier, or a contractor. Nobody else in the building world has that experience of bringing all of those parts together. I think a lot of the reason for the traction that you’re finding, and some other people who are doing similar things are finding, is because of that.
There’s this program in the states called Hestia that’s a U.S. Federal program to make biogenic carbon-storing building materials. Almost $50 million last year went to projects [in this program].
But when I went to their launch [I saw that] the people making the materials are academic material scientists, and they’re often going down kooky paths because they don’t even know the system that they’re trying to deliver this product into. Their research is top notch and they understand the technical part of the product, but there are hardly any people that connect that with how it has to be formed to work in the construction world, or how you need to actually build it, or how you figure out the fire safety and the engineering and all that kind of stuff, and then how you talk to the person on the ground who’s going to install it. There’s hardly anybody who knows how to do all of those things, but there is this weird little pool of people who grew up in straw bale and ended up with this really odd but I think super necessary skill set.
I love hearing what you’re doing because it’s something only you and a handful of people who came up in construction in the same way that you did, could be doing.
Lars: There are a lot of crazy things coming together for sure, and I agree with your analysis, I think. I’ve often wondered whether there were other parallel networks out there like straw balers, but I haven’t met them yet.
Chris: I haven’t met them either and I feel like by this point, I probably would have. There’s maybe a parallel with earth builders in the southwestern U.S. But they don’t have the whole biogenic carbon storing piece. They have developed products and codes, but they haven’t had the sort of focus on climate on top of all of that.
Lars: But also when I think about the way we built back then, I think about the focus on a not-for-profit and open source approach. I often say that the people I met, and kept meeting for some years back then, were sort of like activists. We could just as well have focused on equal rights for men and women or fighting against child labor or something. So I have no idea what happened there, but it was something really interesting. In part because it was such a varied bunch of people.
For me it was Matts and Judy embodying a lot of that not-for-profit, artistic, experimental, taking-care-of-each-other thing. Which I still feel that we are trying to follow, as best we can. But I also think now we really need the nourishment that comes with being part of that mind-set, because the world we are in now is not as nourishing anymore to say the least. There aren’t as many workshops or parties or dreaming in that way. It’s a lot more legal work and risk minimizing work and all that stuff, which is maybe interesting to some people, but I don’t think so even though it is necessary.
Chris: [nodding] I was just saying earlier, I feel like there really is much less of an owner builder movement now. And I think for those reasons [you were saying]. As a society there’s just way more risk aversion. The barriers to entry to doing what happened, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, are just so much higher now.
Even just cost wise, when I built my straw bale house I was able to buy a piece of property for a cash amount that I could earn at a not very well paying job over a couple of years. Nobody in my situation today is building a house; my daughter can’t do that.
I think whatever happened there, happened in a very particular context that is not going to happen again in the same way. But if I look at where so many of those people have ended up and that sort of outsized influence that they’ve had, it’s nuts. Like David Eisenberg and Martin Hammer have written five building code appendixes for natural materials. They now take up half the real estate of the back of the building code. Nobody has that kind of influence at the code level. David knows everybody who does anything with codes and standards and is super influential that way. And even where I’ve landed, and what you’re doing, there are so many people doing crazy things.
I think it kind of comes down to that. People had that interesting skill set of giving a shit and caring about other people and this really broad sense that to do good, you have to do good in a lot of ways. The straw thing was just a magnet for that because it does a bunch of things really well. It’s a waste , it’s biogenic, it’s just healthy, it’s non-toxic, it’s friendly to new builders; it had enough things that people who had that kind of multifaceted approach of doing good in some broader way.
Lars: I think that sounds right to me. That’s a good way of putting it.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t know if you feel like what you’re getting done in Denmark is big and impactful or not, but I’ll tell you that from where I’m sitting, it sure is.
Lars: No, it feels like stuff is happening for sure. But the community is just something I really need personally. I’m missing that. Not too much yet, but I cannot sustain myself in what I’m doing without some of that old good stuff. So for me, it’s incredibly valuable to have a talk like this with you Chris. It does me a lot of good.
Chris Magwood helped to establish Builders for Climate Action in 2019 and has been leading development of the BEAM carbon estimator tool for low-rise construction. In 2022, he joined the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Embodied Carbon initiative within RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings team. From 2011-2022, Chris was a director and teacher at The Endeavour Centre, a not-for-profit sustainable building school. He has authored seven books on sustainable building. His new book, Building Beyond Zero: New Ideas for Carbon-Smart Architecture, is co-authored with Bruce King and published by Island Press. Chris is an active speaker and workshop instructor in Canada and internationally.
Lars Keller grew up in a big family on the small island of Læsø. Making the most of having parents with no intentions of enforcing their own ambitions through their kids, Lars had for a while been puzzled by the apparent mismatch between the highly educated Danish population and the apparent lack of focus on changing the biggest hurdles of humankind. One day in 1997 Lars had the good luck to meet an American natural builder who was travelling the old world.This meeting sparked the wish to contribute to the global non-for profit, open-source work to develop and share the simple and sustainable building technique of using local, fast growing biomass, aka straw bale building. In 2002 this journey led Lars to Jo in Wagga Wagga, Australia, and since then Lars has been in Love. Jo and Lars have built their own little home (Barbara Jones hybrid style) in the mortgage-free community of Friland in Denmark where their kids are born and bred. A while back their focus was on spreading the good word about mortgage free living, while they now focus on injecting their knowledge about natural building into the mainstream.
