Material Impacts

With mounting climate and carbon pressures, leadership depends on collaborating across disciplines, communicating value clearly, and convincing stakeholders to act—especially in existing buildings. This session explores recycling construction materials as a practical, low‑risk circular strategy especially in policy‑driven retrofit markets like NYC under Local Law 97. Using architectural glass as a main case study, presenters will show how specification, coordination, and metrics can reduce waste and embodied carbon within familiar project workflows.

This session will focus on how AI is impacting project workflows today. One of AI’s strengths is reducing manual effort and enabling analysis at a scale not feasible with human labor alone. In true NESEA style, this is not a thought piece. Multiple technology providers will kick off with a round-robin, sharing how they use AI to deliver value today. The session will then shift to a structured discussion, bringing in attendee perspectives on AI’s environmental impact and how we can leverage technology to solve problems, not compound them.

Embodied carbon assessments have traditionally excluded MEP systems, but recent analyses show MEP systems contribute more embodied carbon than structures and enclosures for certain building types. This session will bring together experts from different sectors to emphasize the importance of considering the embodied carbon of MEP systems alongside operational carbon. Speakers will share the current challenges in this field and provide a roadmap for quantifying, and ultimately reducing, MEP embodied carbon.

The member businesses of the Seed Collaborative pursue a common mission: to lock carbon into the walls of buildings through the use of straw structural insulated panels (S-SIPs). The bigger bet they are making, though, isn't about the material; it's about the model. This keynote goes inside a network of decentralized, bioregional manufacturers built around one cooperatively owned hub, with shared R&D, financing, purchasing, and training that no single small manufacturer could afford alone.