What’s The Carbon Cost Of A Home?

Written By Teacher: Elizabeth Ward

My name is Elizabeth Ward. I am a former Early Childhood, Elementary, and English as a Foreign Language educator. I have taught third grade Science and Social Studies as well as Kindergarten in both urban and rural Oklahoma public schools. I taught online EFL to students of all ages in China for four years. I also have experience in curriculum development and content design for teachers in the physical and digital classroom. As a former teacher I have a passion for supporting teachers and making their jobs easier. I currently live in the greater Houston area with my husband and four dogs. 

The construction of a new house generates a significant amount of carbon dioxide emissions, primarily from the production and transportation of building materials. Understanding the carbon footprint of homebuilding allows students to explore sustainable alternatives and consider the environmental impact of design choices. This topic provides an opportunity to discuss energy-efficient materials, construction methods, and long-term sustainability. Utilizing resources such as carbon calculators, case studies, and green building guides can help students connect these concepts to real-world decision-making. Explore this resource about buildings from Project Drawdown to further the conversation with your students. 

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

To know how much carbon is emitted by building a house, says David Hsu, MIT associate professor of urban and environmental planning, you need to know the embodied energy of a house: how much energy was used to make all the materials that go into a home. It’s a complicated question, because a house contains not only common building materials like concrete, brick, and steel, but also aluminum, wood, glass, copper, asphalt shingles, and all sorts of plastics, from vinyl flooring to weatherproofing house wrap.

“All of those things involve greenhouse gas emissions,” Hsu says. “The cement and steel are probably the two biggest categories we know of because they're relatively easy to measure. But a house is a combination of pretty much every industrial material you can imagine.”

Steel and concrete are particularly problematic emitters because creating them requires heating raw materials to high temperatures, and the energy to do this typically comes from fossil fuels. As a result, the creation of cement for concrete is responsible for 7% of the entire world’s carbon emissions, while steel creates 2.3 tons of carbon for every ton of metal produced. Among the other materials, aluminum is a particularly high emitter, causing 3% of the world’s direct industrial CO2 emissions.