Veteran structural engineer Don Davies often confesses that, by his own calculations, his annual personal carbon footprint is a whopping 10 times the global average and 3.5 times the US average.
“I drive an electric car, I have solar panels at home and I live in a green grid electricity site, but I also fly a lot,” explains Davies, who co-founded with his wife Joan Crooks the young sustainability consultant Davies. -Associated Crooks.
Flying a lot is an understatement. During his first decade at structural engineer Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA) in Seattle, which he left last February after 33 years, Davies says he had a passport stamp every month from somewhere in Southeast Asia .
But instead of basing himself, Davies believes he can have a bigger positive impact on climate change by working to reduce concrete’s high carbon build-up. Risking their own millions, he and Crooks donned the hats of developers. They’re upgrading a 5,126-square-meter building, called Hubbard’s Corner, as a living test lab to debut new green materials. “I saw an opportunity to implement a lot of things that we talked about, but never as a structural engineer had the opportunity to control,” says Davies, who is moving his office into the building in March.
Davies’ move to the front lines of the fight against climate change has two goals: to remove, for others, the fear factor associated with specifying the latest green products that have no track record of long-term construction, durability and performance term, and create a development model for the reduction of embodied carbon.
An avid runner who grew up in the mountains of central Idaho and who, with Crooks, owns his family’s farm, Davies has nature in his bones. “I was drawn to working on tall buildings to make the urban environment livable and preserve the natural landscape,” he says.
Until Hubbard’s Corner, Davies’ carbon reduction work was behind the scenes. He is co-founder of the Carbon Leadership Forum. He was part of the team that developed EC3, as it is known, which was the first free digital tool to measure the embodied carbon of a building project. At MKA, he helped write the Hines Incorporated Carbon Reduction Guide. And he currently serves as chairman of the board of the non-profit organization Building Transparency, which runs EC3 and more.
Davies owes his environmental activism in part to Crooks, whom he met through mutual friends while climbing Mount Adams, shortly after moving to Seattle in 1987. In 2020, Crooks left the Washington Environmental Council, a advocacy group he led for 25 years. “I’m not kidding that we’re going to fix them [climate change] problems with Hubbard’s Corner, but it’s a start,” he says.
More than a startup, Hubbard’s Corner is a launch pad for a global movement, starting with an initiative of the ClimateWorks Foundation. Davies leads a team that is creating eight projects as case studies to demystify low-carbon concrete mixes for different building types, applications and locations. The results will be shared for free.
“The ambition is to change cement and concrete globally [sectors] first seeding best practices through the
USA, and then have the participants spread the practices far and wide,” says Scott Shell, associate director of industry at ClimateWorks. “Don is trusted and an expert, known around the world,” adds Shell, saying that the industry leaders are listening.
Denis Hayes, a former ENR news writer for Seattle’s super-sustainable Bullitt Center, which was ENR’s Best Projects Project of the Year in 2013, says, “Don feels the world is desperately wrong and he wants to do everything he can to fix it. He’s already made an impact.”
