Team of UBC students builds one of Canada's first near-zero embodied carbon campus spaces

A team of students from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has built a near-zero embodied carbon building on campus using hempcrete, wood, and steel as primary materials.Called the Third Space Commons, the project was led by Third Quadrant Design, UBC’s first green building design team. The group is comprised of 60 students from the Faculty of Applied Science and the Sauder School of Business. The building is a wooden structure spanning 2,400 square feet, made from the adaptive reuse of an existing single-family home on the campus. Every aspect of the project, from the materials to the building methods, were chosen to decrease and capture carbon emissions.  The building’s thermal insulation is made of hempcrete, a concrete substitute made of lime and hemp fibers that is effective in carbon sequestration. Its foundation was constructed with reusable steel piles, and, for most of the project, the team used light wood framing instead of engineered wood, which contains fossil fuel-derived adhesives. The team also reused many materials from other construction sites in Vancouver, including the building’s windows, solar panels, appliances, and lumber, whic...