• 9:00 am – The River That Made Seattle

    Once teeming with bountiful salmon and fertile plains, Seattle’s Duwamish River drew both Native peoples and settlers to its shores over centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river was its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Much of Washington’s history…

  • 10:30am – Concrete Carbon Solutions

    The top 50 architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) firms, and other key professionals responsible for well over one trillion dollars of global annual construction have rallied around establishing building sector emissions targets to meet the Paris Agreement. The embodied carbon emissions of construction products represent a significant portion of emissions and unlike operational carbon emissions these…

  • 10:30am – The Need for Affordable, Sustainable Housing

    We have dual climate and affordable housing emergencies bearing down on us as a community and a world. In order to be truly sustainable, our communities must make note of the equitable access to clean, green, affordable housing. Our communities in Redmond and Kirkland are 100% LEED Platinum certified, and yet close to three quarters…

  • 12:00pm – How Buildings Can Reverse Climate Change

    Emissions arising from manufacturing building materials for North American homes add around 65 million metric tonnes of GHGs every year. And the drive to improve energy efficiency in homes may push these emissions even higher. Understanding the impacts of material carbon emissions (MCEs) is critical for all of us in the homebuilding industry. Fortunately, homebuilders…