 Welcome back to Sustainability Month on Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. We've got another great sustainability focused interview today with Amy Musanti. Amy, please introduce yourself and tell us about your role here. Gladly, thanks Mia. Hey everyone, I'm Amy Musanti, Director of Sustainable Building Solutions here with Otha Abloy, based in Connecticut. I work with our manufacturing companies and operating sites to help green our products and processes. And then I work very closely in the fields with our sales and specification teams, teaching everyone how sustainable doors, frames, hardware and access control can contribute to progressive built environments. All right, well, welcome back. We are so glad you are joining us again. Me too. So can you tell us what all this talk about carbon in the building industry has been about lately? Oh yes, and there has been a lot of talk around carbon lately. And it's something that it's really important for us to be educated about. So believe it or not, within the building sector, that represents the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gas or what we've referred to as GHG. And that accounts for almost 40% of total GHG emissions, which is absolutely astounding. And also tells us that we need to take action because we do exist here in the building industry. Something that's really interesting and this puts it into perspective is a statistic that I came across recently. So it's been predicted that over the next 35 years, two trillion square feet of buildings will be constructed worldwide. And that is equivalent to building the entire city of New York. Every 35 days for 35 years. That's a lot of material being sourced and used and that means we need to be more responsible about our carbon footprint. Yeah, wow, oh my goodness. All right, so how does embodied carbon get measured? We use a methodology called an LCA or life cycle assessment. Always good to define these things because we have many acronyms and abbreviations in our industry. So an LCA or a life cycle assessment is familiar for people that are in our industry, but they probably see this information in a format or a more common document that we refer to as an EPD or an environmental product declaration. So these documents are issued by building products manufacturers as a way to share data with customers, but they also in turn use this data to make more responsible products so we can actually optimize what we're developing to bring better products to market. So a life cycle assessment measures a building or building material from each stage of its life cycle which starts at the raw material supply or extraction all the way until the product's end of life. One metric within a life cycle assessment is called GWP or global warming potential and that is what we use to measure and track embodied carbon. Okay, so you mentioned EPDs. Where can I locate them and how can I best understand the data that's in there? So many manufacturers in our industry including OSA Abloy have issued environmental product declarations for their products and in the spirit of true transparency these documents are located right on a manufacturer's website and also in online databases like Mindful Materials. We also have online tools like the EC3 tool which we'll talk about at the end and that will examine an environmental product declaration and output carbon footprint information that's relevant for any person to review and document. So it puts it into relevant terms for most people. Interesting. So can you tell us how OSA Abloy is working towards reducing carbon emissions? Yes, it's a massive undertaking but we've signed on to the Science-Based Targets Initiative which is a global initiative and that encourages us to measure, track and reduce our overall global footprint. And more information can be found on our website and also within our Global Sustainability Report. I know all about that from last time. All right, thank you Amy for coming on today. I will put a link below for the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator Tool or a better known as the EC3 tool. If you have questions or comments please leave them below and make sure you like this video and subscribe to our channel to stay updated on when our new videos come out. Thanks for watching.