How Biomaterials Are Central to Decarbonizing the Built Environment

The next frontier of sustainable architecture isn’t about minimizing impact – it’s about actively regenerating our environment through the buildings we create. At the NESEA’s BuildingEnergy Boston earlier this year, experts from MASS Design Group and New Frameworks shared insights into how biomaterials are moving beyond basic sustainability to reshape our understanding of carbon-storing architecture.

The conversation couldn’t be more timely. At 37% of global emissions, the construction sector dwarfs all other industries in its climate impact – but this also means it holds the greatest potential for change. A recent UN report, “Building Materials and the Climate: Constructing a New Future,” has highlighted biomaterials as a critical intersection point in decarbonizing the global economy. But this isn’t just about swapping traditional materials for organic alternatives. As industry leaders are discovering, it’s about reimagining our entire approach to construction and its relationship with the natural world.

The movement towards biomaterials represents more than a technological shift – it’s a fundamental rethinking of how we interact with our environment. Unlike conventional construction methods that often deplete resources and contribute to carbon emissions, biomaterials offer a path to regenerative architecture that actively stores carbon and promotes ecological health.

Tune into this excerpt from Jacob Deva Racusin from the course “Biomaterials: A Regional and Global Movement for Climate Justice and Resilience” to learn more and enroll for free to hear the whole conversation! 

So there’s three big takeaways from this. Actually, so the biggest highlight overview thing here is that one biomaterials are at the critical intersection of being able to decarbonize the global economy materials and actually matter and that using biobased materials and the carbon storage potential of those materials is one of the most impactful mechanisms of drawing carbon down out of the atmosphere. So that felt really big. 

There’s basically three main strategies they outline.

1. Avoid the extraction and production of raw materials by galvanizing a circular economy.
2. Shift to regenerative material practices whenever possible using ethically-produced low carbon earth- and bio-based building materials.
3. And improve methods to radically decarbonize conventional materials, such as concrete, steel, and aluminum. And only use these non renewable carbon intensive extractive materials when absolutely necessary. 

So this is kind of the reduce, reuse, recycle thing. We’re recycling! And 14 percent of plastic is now recycled.

And we’ve stalled out there for a generation. What we don’t want to see is just looking at that last point and say, “alright, decarbonizing materials, we’re done.” That’s the third point. So all the work we’re doing right now to reduce the carbon intensivity of these really high intensive architectural materials. Yes, that’s critical, important, good. And also that’s step three and part of a larger multi-step strategy for what it actually means to decarbonize the built environment. 

So – biomaterials – what I want to be super clear about is that it’s not about the technology in isolation. 

There is a version of this where we take a bunch of bio-based materials that are, for all practical purposes, petrochemicals that have been churned through the conventional agricultural system into organic matter. Then that gets combined with a bunch of urea formaldehyde and other plastic crap and turned into a bio-based material that is, let’s just be super clear that that is not what we’re talking about. Just the fact that it’s made from an organic compound does not make it a legitimate, carbon-storing, regenerative solution.

So getting a sense of what does agriculture mean on the left here, where it was extractive and expensive, exploitative and resource-depleting and sort of filling out all of the existent colonialist approach to resource management that’s got us into this problem versus a model in which we’re integrated within a holistic nature-based, multi-value, ecosystem-forward approach to biomaterials.

That sounds heady and conceptual. And now there’s an international body of research that validates this as quite legitimately the difference between what it means using bio-based materials to reduce the carbon impact of our work. 

I’m going to pull some quotes out of here because they said it really well.

“Biobased materials may represent our best hope for radical decarbonization through the responsible management of carbon cycles.”