This recording is from the Future of Museums Summit held October 29–30, 2024. This session can help your museum calculate, track, and reduce the environmental impact of their daily operations and temporary exhibitions.

Presenters:

Douglas Flandro, Exhibit Designer & Sustainable Design Leader, CambridgeSeven

Lance Cutrer, Director of Environmental Sustainability, Museum of Discovery and Science

Leslie Tom, Chief Sustainability Officer, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History

Transcript

Douglas Flandro:

Hello, my name is Douglas Flandro. I think I’m onstage. I didn’t hear the introduction, but I am pleased to join you with some colleagues of mine who are working on carbon footprint in our museums. And let me share some slides with you. So we’re going to be talking about calculating the carbon footprint of your museum exhibits. My colleagues are Leslie Tom and Lance Cutrer. Leslie is from the Charles Wright Museum of African-American History and Lance is from the Museum of Discovery and Science in Florida. They are two people who are doing some great work thinking about reducing the carbon footprint in their museums. And they’re going to present as case studies the work that they’re doing there. And I’m really excited about the work they’re doing just on the cutting edge of reducing carbon in museums.

So what is carbon footprint? I just wanted to talk really briefly about the difference between operational energy and embodied carbon. So operational energy is what you are using as you’re running your museum exhibits. So if you have media going on or a TV screen on or your lights on, the energy that’s used to run those things is operational energy or operational carbon. And you can see here that that’s only used in the use of a product. The navy blue cloud here represents operational carbon. Where embodied carbon looks at the energy and also methane, anything that is carbon that’s released into the atmosphere that warms the climate, that’s embodied carbon. And we use a carbon dioxide equivalent just to compare apples to apples. So methane has maybe 10 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide, but anytime they use methane gas or natural gas, they convert it to carbon dioxide equivalent so that when we look at the embodied carbon of a product, it is always shown in something that is equal. It’s just in one unit. So carbon dioxide equivalent, that’s what that means.

So I work both in exhibits and with architectural clients. And in architecture we’re further ahead than most museum exhibit designers are. And through things like LEED and other programs like the International Living Future Institute, they’re requiring manufacturers to create something called an EPD, which is an environmental product declaration. And this is a study that they have done to analyze the embodied carbon of a product. If you get an EPD, it’s this 15 to 20 page document that is really difficult to decipher. But what we are looking for, if we’re looking at the embodied carbon of a product, is something called the global warming potential. And you can see here that it is… It’s probably kind of small on your screen, but you can see here that it’s shown in carbon dioxide equivalent. So this is an EPD for Forbo flooring. This is a resilient flooring, and the embodied carbon is 1.2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. So that’s what we’re looking for if we’re looking for an EPD.

And most EPDs, or most of the things we’re talking about here today are A1 through A3, which is called cradle-to-gate. So that’s extraction through manufacturing basically from the manufacturing to the store, wherever you buy this product from is cradle-to-gate. It’s optional in the United States, but I think it’s more required in Europe. So a lot of the EPDs will also show you cradle-to-grave. That’s where they’ve done a study to see how much carbon or what the embodied carbon is for the use of the product, the transportation, the use, repair, maintenance and even the end of life. You also hear cradle-to-cradle and that’s where it takes this stage D, where you look at recycling, renovation and getting it ready for reuse. So you have cradle-to-gate, cradle-to-grave and cradle-to-cradle.

So I’m just going to do a quick activity. We’re going to set up a poll here. The first poll, I’m going to ask you to guess the carbon footprint of these materials. So let’s see, can we start the poll here? So think about these four materials. These are materials often used in exhibits. Let’s see, we have a poll coming up. Well, I don’t see a poll coming, so make sure I’m… Oh, here it is. So go ahead and vote on which product is the one you think has the highest carbon footprint. And when we think we have enough responses, we’ll end that poll. Let’s see, can we see the results of that poll or…

All right, so it looks like acrylic, people think acrylic has the highest carbon footprint and then MDF is the second. No? Let’s see. Tied, A/C plywood and MDF. Let’s do one more poll. We’re going to see what the carbon footprint is of one more material. So we’re looking at aluminum, concrete, glass and steel. Let’s see if you can guess which one has the largest carbon footprint. I just want you to start thinking about carbon footprint and… All right, so take a minute to think about, these are more products that you would see in building materials, although some of them, aluminum and glass, are sometimes seen in exhibits. All right, take one more minute to finish that poll. Okay, thank you. And people think that concrete has the highest carbon footprint, followed by steel, and that’s what we often see. If we could go back to the slides. So you’re right, acrylic was the highest carbon footprint per kilogram, but actually aluminum has the highest carbon footprint over concrete and stainless steel. But let’s look a little bit more into the data there.

So let’s see, let me just… It’s important to… Let’s see. So if you look at cardboard and MDF, according to those graphs there, cardboard has a higher carbon footprint to MDF, but you have to think about what size of panel you’re going to be using. So a four-foot by eight-foot panel of cardboard is three kg, and the same size of MDF panel is 44 kg. So if you look at that number that we got, which is carbon footprint per kg, then actually the cardboard is much smaller than MDF. And the same is true with concrete and steel, that when you’re using concrete and steel, it’s less carbon footprint per kg, but you’re using a lot more carbon and steel than aluminum for example. So that’s important.

All right, so this is just an overall view of all those materials, and acrylic actually has the highest carbon footprint per kg. And we’ll come back and talk about this a little bit more. So now I’m going to turn the time over to Leslie. She’s going to talk to you about the work that she’s doing at the Wright Museum.

Leslie, it looks like Leslie, you’re muted still.

Leslie Tom:

Thanks. Let’s start again. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining today. I’m thrilled to present our d.Tree project, a hyper-local exhibition, a name inspired by Joyce Lee. Shout out to her. This exhibition reflects our commitment to creating environmentally conscious, community-centered museum work that is deeply connected to local landscapes and African-American culture. I feel like my slides are auto-advancing somehow, but I’m on slide two.

The mission of our museum, the Charles H. Wright Museum, is powerful, to open minds and change lives through the exploration and celebration of African-American history and culture. This project is an extension of that mission focusing on environmental stewardship as a critical part of our community’s narrative and future.

Next slide. This journey began as a collaboration between the Wright Museum and our neighbors to the north, the College for Creative Studies. Together, we set out to create a zero-waste project and explore the intersection of environmental responsibility and cultural heritage. Next slide.

So the story starts out in 2017 when we discovered that our Zelkova trees on our museum grounds were girdling. This means that the roots were strangling the trees, and it was due to improper planting when the museum was built in 1997, the third iteration of our museum site. This discovery led us on a path to environmental responsibility leading to the creation of the d.Ttree exhibition. Next slide.

We partnered with Dr. Ian Lambert, who’s the graduate dean and research dean at the College of Creative Studies now called CCS. Along with six other CCS students and seven other community climate creatives, this diverse team of voices and talents became the heart and soul of this project. Next slide.

So I would like to show a little video on the story of this project that captures our journey and creative process. So Doug, I think you’ll have to unshare your screen and the video should pop up. Or maybe it’s just us.

Speaker 3:

“Trees need to be the center of our lives.” A quote by Dabls.

Speaker 4:

In 2018, several Zelkova trees were found to be dying on the Wright’s campus in Detroit, Michigan. With its commitment to be a zero-waste institution, the Wright Museum reached out to its neighbor across the street, the College of Creative Studies, to find a way to save these trees from mulch pile and landfill. Together, they developed a program called the d.Tree Studio Project and invited 12 makers, community members and students to explore ways to extend the life of these trees in meaningful and profound ways. With an eye toward connecting generations, communicating with the natural world, foregrounding ecological processes, and imagining a more equitable future for the residents of Detroit, these woodworkers brought their considerable skills to meet the challenge.

Etta Adams:

For me, the d.Tree Project allowed us to… Some people being from the Charles Wright museum, some people being from College for Creative Studies, some people being from the corporate industry coming together and collaborating, building bridges to help us to be responsible for Mother Earth, and that is being responsible and understanding our relationship to the trees and their relationship to the universe. And so, it allowed me to be able to be reintroduced to the power of trees and the whole what I would call the symphony of nature.

Leslie Tom:

Thanks. That’s just a small part of the video. If you’d like to watch more, go to our museum website at thewright.org. So if we go back to our slide deck, I’ll continue the presentation. So next slide. So you might be wondering how did this all happen, and… Maybe the slide before. Yes. So this did not happen. This has been 10 years in the making to work on this type of projects. And the first step was that our board of trustees and executive leadership team helped to create a sustainability strategic goal. It’s one of five for our museum. It was officially adopted in 2020, and it’s really helped to create a foundation for being able to work cross-departmentally throughout our museum to be able to work on these types of sustainability projects. Next slide.

So in this collaborative spirit, we did not just one exhibit but two exhibits and it really leverages the idea of how important collaborations are, especially in our case working with an art and design school who were just across the street. So when the first student exhibit launched, we were able to have a lunch with all of our directors at our museum. And so, we had the idea to bring this exhibit over to the Wright Museum. The next couple of years, we were able to weave in community engagement and sustainable design practices, which I’ll talk about next. Next Slide.

So one of the tools that we started using and why we’re sharing all this information is because we were able to use some of the carbon calculators, but also the sustainable exhibit design and construction toolkit that Doug helped to create. So I will dive in deeper to that toolkit. So next slide.

One of the practical steps we took was to consider how artwork arrived at our museum. So some of the pieces we were able to walk over with different collaborators. Others, we were able to use the College of Creative Studies shuttle, change their path a little bit and come to our museum and minimize the environmental footprint of our transportation materials by using recycled cardboard for our shipping materials. Next slide.

We made conscious choices to use module walls, prioritize local sourcing, opting for fabric graphics instead of vinyl. And these were all items that were in the sustainable exhibition checklist toolkit. Next slide.

In addition to all of our sustainable design work, we also wanted to tell the story to our visitors and to the public. So we embedded that graphic into our exhibition so visitors could learn not just about the artwork, but also about our environmental impact and our journey towards a greener museum. Next slide.

Some of the unexpected outcomes for this project was that there was an increased collaboration from all the different departments. Our curatorial exhibitions, design facilities, sustainability teams all worked together. And it was really surprising to see people yelling out ideas on how we could start to reduce our carbon footprint. I think it really helped to strengthen our museum as a whole and we got to include some of the interns as well. Next slide.

And as this project progressed, we were able to… During our exhibition design process, we partnered with a number of local urban lumber and tree organizations in Detroit and nationally. This led to a unique community initiative where we were able to give away trees to any metro Detroiter who visited our exhibit. We worked with then American Forest, the City of Detroit tree program, and the Greening of Detroit, a nonprofit helping to give out trees. It was a way of bringing climate actions directly to our community through our exhibitions Next slide.

And because we partnered with an art and design college, we were able to have some of the students, who were part of the actual d.Tree program, come over and help paint rather than use vinyl. We chose paint that has certified lower volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. And it was these small choices that helped to make an environmental impact that we were able to track and record as part of our carbon footprint. Next slide.

To visually represent our commitment to sustainability, CCS’s wood shop created our exhibit’s logo out of recycled wood. It’s a small symbol, but it really helped to carry a powerful message. And once again, we didn’t have to use vinyl. Next slide.

So here, under our hood of our material tracking and documentation, we created an Excel spreadsheet that we documented all materials and the carbon usage. And Doug Flandro, on this panel, even helped to call a number of the manufacturers to confirm carbon details. And it seems like [inaudible 00:21:16] conversations that people really are starting to understand what carbon footprint each of the materials are having. So scope 1, 2 and 3. This transparent tracking method is what we’re planning to move into future exhibitions. Next slide.

We also use the Gallery Carbon Calculator from London to help to measure our impact. Although it doesn’t account for all of our building energy usage, this calculator helped to quantify our footprint for realistic benchmarks. Next slide.

And here’s our results of that, which is this very hyper local exhibit for our d.Tree project. Used about 1.8 tons of carbon. Doug talked a little bit about tons of carbon and contrasted to a typical international museum expert where artwork is flying all over the world that could use up to 1,800 tons of carbon. But this illustration illustrates the potential impact of measuring materials, packaging, printing, shipping and travel. Next slide.

One of the other pilots we did for this exhibit to further enhance our transparency is that we piloted some sensors into the project and start to collect real-time data. This shows a carbon dioxide center to be able to understand where people are lingering in our exhibit. This step is a step we’re starting to work on more to be able to understand and mitigate our footprint. Next slide.

So in conclusion, the d.Tree exhibit was very transformational for us. It helped to foster collaborations, it helped us to count and understand our carbon footprint and it enabled us to make more conscious decisions about material choices that we are selecting to resonate with the environment. Next slide.

So this is just the beginning and I invite all of you to be able to join us on our journey to more sustainable future. You can follow us at thewright.org or follow us on any of the social media channels. Next slide.

And I just wanted to shout out that all of this work helped us win an international service design award. This really reflects the fact that this museum and this institution is supporting systems-level thinking, holistic thinking, and that we are reflecting that as part of the systems of being part of this earth. I’m going to pass it on to Lance Cutrer from the Science Museum of Discovery.

Lance Cutrer:

Hello everyone. Hope everyone’s having a great day today. That’s funny. Well, my name is Lance. I am from the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale. And today, I’m going to share with you how we are approaching lower carbon exhibits. We’re fairly new to the game in this and we’re going through our thought process in how we’re designing and how we’re experimenting really with this whole concept and this whole idea. Here at the Museum of Discovery and Science, I’m the director of environmental sustainability. We’re located in sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So if you ever find yourself in South Florida, you’re more than welcome. Come on in and take an explore. We’re a family-friendly science museum and we focus on a lot of different cool science concepts.

But next slide, let’s talk a little bit about our little exhibits. So we’re starting small. Our initial idea was to prototype this concept, low carbon exhibits. What does that mean? What does that mean for us? How does it fit into our timeline from specific funders? How does it fit into budget and how does it all mesh together? So we thought we would try with this little small exhibit space. We’re going to start small, and through a partnership with LEGO, specifically the LEGO Build the Change program, we wanted to build six LEGO building tables. It seems pretty simple and straightforward, and for all you exhibit people out there, you could probably design that very quickly and go out and build them in a very short amount of time, right? Plywood flat surface, pretty simple, straightforward. So we thought that it would be a good platform to apply these concepts to this simplified design and to see how far we can take it, how far we can go with it, how does it work, and really use it as a case study for ourselves.

So six LEGO building tables, some signage. That’s what those wire framings are. This is a rendering, of course. We would have three that are taller for older guests and three that are younger for Duplo bricks to be included for our younger guests. And we thought it would be a great fit as well because the Build the Change is all about building the change you want to see in the world for climate and beyond. So I thought it would fit very well. So next slide starts off where we started.

And this is true for any project that you might go on and launch too. The lowest carbon option is often the thing that you already have or the thing that you can repurpose. If it was destined for the dumpster, that’s a big fat zero on your carbon accounting budget. That’s great. We want to see lots of nothing. So if you can start with that, it’s a great opportunity. The images you see here on the left was from a huge live oak tree that we had out in our backyard science park area that was diseased. It needed to come down, unfortunately. So we repurposed a lot of that tree. 90% of that tree is still on site as mulch or benches or other things like this. And we had the main trunk cut into slabs similar to some of what Leslie was doing with her project. And we thought, “Okay, can we use this stuff? Maybe we don’t know.”

We also on the right side, had someone donate some wood flooring. This is Miami Dade County pine. This stuff is super valuable, rot resistant, awesome wood that we could repurpose. So we started thinking through, “Can we use this stuff?” Go to the next slide please. The answer happened to be no. So then, to fit within the budget and the timeline that we had for this small project, the answer was, it was going to take too long to refinish those things. And so we were going to have to go with something that we were going to have to purchase. So the next thing we do is look for products that are minimally processed, raw materials, scraps, natural products. We actually ended up… And I’m going to show you in a second… Ended up going with plywood, but the way we used it to stain the plywood, instead of using traditional stains and sealants, we used coffee. So our exhibits team had a fantastic fun day of using a flamethrower to burn, a torch to… I guess flamethrower is a bit dramatic… A torch to burn in some designs in the plywood and then used coffee.

This is literally coffee grounds that have been brewed. And then to stain, they were experimenting with other products like beet juice. Turmeric gives you a nice orange color, spirulina gives you a nice bluish-green color. And then, we seal it with beeswax. So these are those raw materials, those natural products that are minimally processed. The more a product is manufactured, the more it’s going to have embodied carbon associated with it. So minimally processed equals lesser carbon emissions, embodied carbon. Next slide please.

These are ultimately some of the materials we ended up going with. So if you don’t have material to reuse or repurpose, look for the next best thing. This is no way an endorsement for any of these products, but I thought they were useful things to share in our research and going through. We have these nice little acrylic cases to show off some of our really cool LEGO builds that our exhibits team and some of our interns here built and we wanted to protect them, so we wanted to put some sort of acrylic around them. As Douglas showed us earlier, acrylic is a super high greenhouse gas embodied carbon. We found an alternative, it’s called Recrylic. It’s made of 100% recycled acrylic. According to their numbers, it’s 90% less embodied carbon than standard acrylic. So that’s an interesting option for us.

The plywood we chose to use is PureBond plywood. This stuff, it was a gold mine in finding this. It’s FSC certified, so Forestry Stewardship Council certified and it is Red List free, so formaldehyde free plywood. It has a declare label that is associated with it through the Living Futures Institute, and you can find it at Home Depot, everyone. Super easy, all across the country, you can find this stuff, so it’s easily accessible. It’s reasonably priced and it has all these extra benefits of being a little more green. And then, cardboard signage, instead of traditional plastic signage and this kind of thing, so we could reuse it somewhere else. It will have a life after actually being a sign. We can use it in our maker space and other things like this. So next slide please.

I’ll show you the end result. So this is what they look like. I think they did a pretty good job. We have two built so far and you can see the cardboard signage hanging on the little lattice there. We eventually were going to have six of these tables, and the way that they’re fastened together that there’s no fasteners, they’re locked together with the little groove system. So they come apart really easily. We can move them really easy. And I think that coffee stained wood looks really great.

It ended up being for each table about five sheets of PureBond plywood, about three cubic feet of Falcon board, two kg of Recrylic and seven kg of LEGO. Yes, we had to include the LEGO in our carbon calculations. LEGO is made of ABS plastic, which does have some embodied carbon associated with it. So based on all the components that went into it, it’s somewhere between 161 to 177 kg of CO2 equivalent. If you were to compare that to making it out of some sort of plastic, it would be much, much higher. So we’re pretty happy with the result on this, and we’ve taken what we’ve learned from this little mini experiment and now we can apply it to bigger exhibits. We’re planning on building a larger climate solutions exhibit with the help of Cambridge Seven and Douglas and at some outdoor exhibits as well.

And so, what can we take from this small case study? Because we did it, it’s super useful for us to figure out the learnings. So it was well worth our time, the little bit of extra time to research some of these products and put it all together. So that’s what I got for you guys. I hope that this is useful. Douglas is actually going to take us through a little activity here in a few minutes. He’s got one more case study and then he’s going to take us through a little activity exploring how we came across these numbers. But I’ll pass it back over to Douglas. Thanks, guys.

Douglas Flandro:

Great. So this case study is an exhibit that was shown at the London Design Museum… It’s called the Design Museum in London. And let me see, I think we can go back one page here. So it was a temporary exhibit talking about our waste culture. And the thing that was really cool about it is they tried to use as low carbon as possible, but they actually hired a consultancy firm to come in and analyze every step of the process, the design, the emails, the video calls, the file sharing, and they figured out how much embodied carbon creating this exhibit cost or used. And so, it’s really useful as we’re thinking about where the biggest impact would be if we are trying to do low carbon exhibits. So their whole exhibit was 28 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. So a 1,000 kg is one metric ton. And they found that the material that had the biggest carbon footprint were the screws.

And you might think, “Oh no, we can’t use screws.” But actually screws do have a relatively small carbon footprint. It speaks more in this case to how low they are able to get all of their other materials down. And I think maybe in this case they didn’t think that the screws would have that much of an impact. But anyway, so out of the 28 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, the steel screws were two kg, 1.9 kg. And compare that to the email, video calls, the file sharing, 0.75 tons. And so, some of them, they used really biodegradable materials, they reused things, they tried to salvage what they could, all the things that you’ve heard Lance and Leslie talking about.

But the biggest impact to make it low carbon was the decision to do all their labor on site and the museum had recently switched to 100% renewable energy supply. And they said that if… So this exhibit that was 28 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. If the museum hadn’t switched to 100% renewable energy, then the same exhibit would’ve used 185 tons. So an 85% increase or reduction in this case because they were on renewable energy supply and did all their labor on site. If you want to know more about this, I just scraped the surface, couple details, but here’s a QR code. It’s also in the resources for this session. If you do want to read more about this exhibit, it’s called the Waste Gage at the Design Museum. This is a great resource.

So we’re going to do another activity. Let me just check the time. I think I’m just going to… If you want to go to this website while I’m talking, feel free to check it out and look around on your own. I think I’m just going to more quickly go through this exercise instead of making it a big activity. But this website is called Sustainability Tools in Cultural Heritage. And this website is great. It was formed because of a grant that they received, I believe, from the National Endowment of the Humanities and one of the national endowments anyway, and it is a database of materials. And we are going to look at these three materials which are often used in exhibits, Sintra, Appleby plywood or just plywood rather. I chose ApplePly plywood and corrugated cardboard, which is just your standard cardboard that A-Flute cardboard is the cardboard that most boxes are made of.

So when you go to this website, the cool thing about this website, it is a database of carbon footprint for many materials that you often use in cultural heritage situations. So exhibits, cases, metals, substrates for graphics. So this is a great resource to go to. A lot of times, I’ll find a great material that I want to find the carbon footprint for and it’ll come up as “coming soon”. So this is a work in progress, but it is a great place to start, especially for museums. But I want to just talk to you about the data that you get here and make sure that you have a little bit of a critical eye with the data that you get. These three materials that we’re looking at, the cardboard, the Sintra, and the ApplePly plywood, it looks like the ApplePly plywood has a much higher carbon footprint than the Sintra, which is a PVC product.

I saw this and I was quite surprised when I first looked it up. And then, I noticed that the units that were given here, the Sintra is kilograms and the ApplePly plywood, which is a really nice plywood that’s made in the U.S. is actually in cubic meters. So to look at these, to compare these apples to apples, you’d need to do a little bit of math. So here’s the math that I did, but basically, what you’re doing is converting this from pounds to kilograms, converting this number that we’ve been given for the ApplePly plywood from volume to weight and then from cubic inches to cubic meters. And then, after we’ve done all these conversions, we find that the carbon footprint of plywood per kg is 0.573 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. So that same graph would actually look more like this where the Sintra is more what I expected, the Sintra is much higher than the ApplePly wood.

And just like before with the cardboard and the MDF, we also need to look at, if we are using this in our exhibit, then we want to compare, we have the kilograms, but we want to compare one four-foot by eight-foot panel, in this case it did one half-inch thick, of Sintra, which is 20 kg, ApplePly, which is 27.2 kg and cardboard, which is 5.5 kg. And you see here that the Sintra is roughly 60 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. ApplePly closer to 16 and cardboard more like a five. And then, you also need to look at how long are you going to be using these materials for. If you have a 30-year exhibit, then probably cardboard is not going to cut it, or at least you need to figure out how many times you’d have to replace that cardboard. But by the same token, you don’t want to use Sintra for something that’s going to last a lot longer for a three-month exhibit because you’d be throwing away all that embodied carbon.

So I’m going to take you to this website here, which is a website that will… Share my screen here. I just want to walk you through one other really powerful place where you can find carbon footprint data. And I’m going to share this screen here. So this is… Let me just make sure. Great. So this is called Building Transparency.org. It’s also in the resources for this session. You do have to create your own… You have to sign in and create an account here, but it is free for designers, but it’s a little bit hard to figure out how it works. So I just wanted to walk you through this on here. What we’re going to do is, this first tab, which is, “Find and Compare Materials”, which will brings up this graphic here. So we’re going to look at maybe modular carpet. So you have to click under “Finishes” and then “Flooring” and then “Carpet”, and then once you get to the end of one of these, then-

Lance Cutrer:

Hey Douglas?

Douglas Flandro:

Yeah.

Lance Cutrer:

I think we’re maybe still seeing the slides instead of your Browser.

Douglas Flandro:

Oh, okay. Thank you. Let me see if I can just move this down here. How’s that?

Lance Cutrer:

Yeah, there we go.

Douglas Flandro:

All right, thank you, Lance. So this is what I did. I just clicked on “Finishes”, “Flooring”, “Carpet”, and then once you reach the end of that, then you need to hit this button here, which is “EPD”. So this is where you’re going to find your EPDs. And then even here, it’ll bring up another screen where you can get a little bit more… We want to look at tiles and you can fill out, if you know that you want a certain product, yarn material, et cetera, you can do that. You can fill out as much or as little of this information as you want. If you know want materials from a certain part of the world, then you can fill that information in. And when you’ve set this to where you want it, then you hit this search button here, which is a little hidden and that’s how you get this really powerful information.

Under here, you get a list of EPDs. So there’s tons of different products. We have 904 different products that are listed on this website, and it’ll tell you the embodied carbon for each of those products. But here it’ll also tell you what is the range that all these 900 EPDs are showing you and what is a conservative estimate? What is an achievable estimate? If I want to have a really low carbon version of this product, what would that be? What’s achievable? And you can continue to change this data here. If you wanted to look at just carbon footprint or a carpet that’s made in Canada, for example, then you could do, just click that and then it’d search and it will change this data appropriately now. Anyway. So it’s a little bit complicated to use, but it’s a really powerful tool. It’s free. It’s called EC3 available through the Building Transparency.org. Now I’m going to try to go back to my slides. Bear with me one moment. Are you seeing my slides now? It says resources, I’ll assume that you are.

Lance Cutrer:

Go it. Yes.

Douglas Flandro:

Thank you. So that’s the information you need, those two websites and others. If you really want to dive down deep and do a carbon calculation and really start to look at and calculate and track the embodied carbon of your materials in your museum exhibits. But here’s some basic principles. Lance talked about some of these already. If you don’t have time to do that, then just some general overall principles of low carbon design are, anytime you can use local bio-based and less processed, those are going to be your lower carbon materials usually. Also think about using fewer materials. What if you didn’t fill up every nook and cranny of your exhibit, but you just used less materials? What if you use salvaged materials? Reuse is better than recycle, but if you can’t use salvaged materials, then use materials that have high levels of recycled content.

You can often save money being sustainable. Everyone thinks that it costs a lot more money to be sustainable, but a lot of these things we’re talking about, especially reuse and salvaged, the smallest museums have to do this because they don’t have any budget to buy new materials. So if you’re smart about it, you can find ways to… If you’re using these principles, you can actually save money. There are things you can do to make it easier to reuse materials. If you have modular designs across your museum, maybe a certain size graphic panel that you use in every gallery of your museum. That way when one exhibit comes down, you can use the same plywood panels, refinish them and reprint them for new exhibits.

And if you invest in a place to store materials or salvaged materials, instead of buying new materials every time, it’s just, you just have to think about where you’re spending your money. Often when you’re refinishing and reusing materials, the money that you’re spending is going into local labor and to local artists and crafts people rather than spending money on vinyl wallpaper that is being ordered from who knows where, that’s some international corporation. So that’s great too.

Here’s just an example of an exhibit we did in Youngstown, Ohio. The museum actually sent out a call to the community asking them to bring in yellow things that made them happy, and they created this great three-dimensional mural. It was called the Shine Wall in this exhibit about mental health. And they did this from community donated objects. Here’s two other artists that I love. He used materials found, salvaged materials. This photo on the left is Tara Donovan. This beautiful cloud sculpture is made out of Styrofoam cups.

And this is just thinking about, in your communities, are there organizations who you could partner with? That maybe I heard about a museum who looked into… Their city had a film board that just tracked all the different films that were filming in their city, in their town or area. And when the films struck their sets, they had tons of waste that they could go and harvest and store and use for their exhibits that were coming up. But if you don’t have a lot of films coming into your community, do you have a theater that builds sets that maybe you could talk to them about what do they do with all their plywood sets when they strike them? Could you use some of those materials for your exhibits?

As you’re thinking along those lines, this is a great resource. This is made by an architectural organization that is advocating for more salvaged product use in architecture. And this is just a map where you can type in your address, and it’ll come up with different places that support salvage and reuse in your community. So check that out. And you can also add resources, if you know of resources in your community, to this open source map. Here’s a bunch of other places. Feel free to take a picture of this or we have a PDF at the end that all this information is in. But these are just places online where you can find salvaged materials.

And lastly, this is the Museum Exhibition Materials Pledge. This is something I created a few years ago when working with a nonprofit organization called Mindful Materials who hosts this on their website. We looked at the American Institute of Architects’ Materials Pledge, and we just adapted this slightly for museums, and we’re asking you all to sign onto this pledge. This is something you can do. You just put your logo onto this letter. This is a letter to manufacturers and what you, as museums and museum designers or fabricators are doing, or you’re telling the manufacturers of products that you use in your museum that you want to see them make more sustainable products and that if they agree to make more sustainable products, that we pledge to prefer those products in our exhibits.

So this just tells them that we’re thinking about these things. We want better things. We want low carbon things. We want things that are better for human health, and there’s power in all of us working together to just tell the manufacturers that this is what we want. You can go to the Mindful Materials website and sign on to this pledge. I hope you do join us in working on this. You can send this a letter to different manufacturers. If you’re buying a new carpet for your exhibit, you can send them this and say, “Tell me what you’re doing in these categories.” Or maybe your museum has a specific category that you’re most interested in.

And this toolkit goes along with the pledge. It goes through each of those five categories of sustainability. This is meant to help museums set their own sustainability goals. So this is the whole broad spectrum of options of what sustainability could mean. And we hope that you can use this to decide for your museum what’s the most important. And then for each one of those categories, it gives you a few steps of things that hopefully you can have a place to start. Like, “Hey, we wanted to think more about embodied carbon and lowering our embodied carbon.” That’s what we talked about here today. But you could look at bio-based materials and how to start tracking carbon for your exhibits. And there’s a list, for example, of all of those websites that you can find salvaged materials on. So hopefully this is a good resource for you.

So questions. I think that’s the end of our presentation, so we hope we can answer some questions from each of you at this time.

Leslie Tom:

Oh, yeah, I think I answered this in the Q&A, but we harvested the wood from Zelkova trees, which are hardy, often specified in Michigan because of the salts and things like that.

Speaker 7:

I think that may have been the only question.

Leslie Tom:

Oh, Amy-

Lance Cutrer:

I think there’s a question in the chat.

Speaker 7:

Here’s another one I’ll bring to stage for you guys.

Lance Cutrer:

Thanks.

Douglas Flandro:

Let’s see, “How do your organizations share this data and with who?” Oh, you’re talking about the carbon footprint data. I think that, go ahead and answer maybe Lance or Leslie.

Lance Cutrer:

Sure. Well, so the data for us so far has been for internal use because we’re still experimenting with this. We’re just trying to have an idea of it internally. So our exhibits team, our CEO, is very interested in all this. As we get better at it, I think it will become a fixture in all of our exhibits for the general public. So it’ll be something we eventually want to sing from the rooftops, like, “This is what we’re doing, we’re walking the walk.” This kind of thing. So, so far internally, with plans to, like I said, share it with the world.

Douglas Flandro:

I think that often it’s used internally to compare materials like, “Hey, should we build this case out of metal or plywood?” And if maybe your exhibits are… A lot of times you have sensitive materials that you can’t use plywood. But if you don’t, then you might consider, “Hey, could we build this? What should we build this out of?” And then you look at price, you look at durability, you look at availability. But this is just one other thing to look at is, “Hey, what about embodied carbon? That’s just one of the factors that we use to choose materials.” And then also, Leslie did a great job at her exhibit about showing the carbon footprint of the exhibit actually on the exhibit floor and in a graphic panel.

And I think museums have a relatively small square footage of building space compared to condominiums or office buildings. But the power that we have is to tell the story. So if we are trying to make a low-carbon exhibit and we have a panel in the graphic or maybe a website where we’re telling people what we’re trying to do, then that’s where we’re really powerful is telling those stories and saying, “Hey, nobody can be perfect, but we’re trying to be more sustainable. This is what we’re doing.” And then people will learn like, “Wait, what is embodied carbon? Should I be asking these questions when I buy something for my home?” And so, that’s really the power of museums. I think you can share that data with your visitors.

Here’s a new question.

Leslie Tom:

Well, actually, just to add onto that, museums are one of the largest contributors of energy. The EUI for most museums are in the 200s, and an office building is in the 100s. And I know Joyce Lee has done a number of articles for AAM that describes some of that. And that leads into this other question of being able to monitor our energy usage, either predictively or after the results of what’s been used. I feel like Energy Star Portfolio Manager is something that museums are starting to contribute at least utility data to. I know our museum is moving in the direction of being able to use sensors, and we’ve built a digital twin, and we’re installing a building management system to start to be able to give us all the data for our energy systems as well. So being able to really, like Douglas said, analyze what electrical devices we’re bringing in into the museum is important, and then, being able to figure out which ones might we off grid with either solar power or more carbon-friendly energy sources.

Lance Cutrer:

I think we have two minutes left, but another aspect of this question is, for energy monitoring, if you’re monitoring the exhibit, a specific exhibit, and Leslie’s approach to having a digital twin of the building is super powerful for that, but having sub meters is maybe a transitional step you could take. So if you’re installing exhibits or you’re upgrading exhibits, looking at the possibility of installing a sub meter for that exhibit and all the components within that exhibit, so you can track it over time could be pretty helpful too.

Douglas Flandro:

We’re actually experimenting with just using an Excel spreadsheet and plugging in if we know the watts that a light bulb or a computer monitor use; you can figure out just really roughly how many hours that’s going to be on and figure out how much energy per year that you’re using for that thing. And if you do make a spreadsheet for your whole exhibit gallery, you can come up with what they call an EUI or an energy use indicator, which is watts per square foot or annual watts per square foot. And then, you can start comparing your exhibits from one exhibit to another. So there’s simple ways you can do it on your own or you can use some of these great tools that Leslie was talking about it.

Lance Cutrer:

All right. Thank you all very much for coming to our session. I appreciate it. Hopefully you learn some cool stuff about carbon accounting.