The Revitalist

An ad from The National Trust's Sustainability Initiative

The PreservationNation blog points out a new Embodied Energy Calculator that is available at thegreenestbuilding.org website. You select your building type, put in your square feet, and the calculator spits out an estimate on the number of MBTUs per square foot that it took to build your building. The idea is to reinforce the concept that preservation is an inherently sustainable style of development because it capitalizes on the energy already expended to build our existing structures. The site also includes a Teardown Calculator that attempts to sum the lost embodied energy, the energy expended in the demolition and the energy investment in the new construction.

To take this one step further, the National Trust is working on a methodology for Life Cycle Assessment for historic structures, as part of their Sustainability Initiative. An LCA seeks to encompass all the energy and materials consumed throughout a building's lifecycle, including resource extraction, energy consumed in manufacturing, use and disposal, etc. That, of course, is a much bigger project, but it could make a compelling case for reuse over demo.