New guidelines in Devens seek to reduce ‘embodied carbon’

Devens, a regional enterprise zone and former military base, has spent the past two decades redeveloping with sustainability in mind, while undergoing extensive remediation work to deal with soil and groundwater contamination due to military operations.

To promote environmental responsibility and sustainability, the Devens Enterprise Commission late last year adopted new embodied carbon reduction guidelines as part of its unified permitting process. (Embodied carbon refers to the carbon dioxide emissions associated with building materials throughout their lifecycle, from extraction to demolition and disposal.)

The Fort Devens Army Installation closed in 1996, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency named it a Superfund Site. Following the base’s closure, the surrounding communities of Ayer, Shirley, Lancaster and Harvard considered what they wanted the site to become. Devens now has more than 120 businesses with more than 10,000 employees.

“People wanted to see it redeveloped in a more responsible manner,” said Devens Enterprise Commission Director Neil Angus. “The whole sustainable redevelopment mission for Devens came from its history of contamination.”

The mission had been incorporated into regulations surrounding Devens’ redevelopment as an eco-industrial park, with businesses working together as a system. Angus compared the redevelopment of the site to a natural ecosystem, where one element feeds off another.

“We take that natural, ecological element and bring it into the industrial park and have businesses working together as a system of industries, where they can maximize efficiencies, minimize waste,” Angus said. “One firm’s waste is another firm’s raw material resource.”

The commission created the Devens Eco-Efficiency Center, which provides educational forums, technical assistance, networking venues, and partnership opportunities to help firms protect resources.

“It’s a very unique program to Devens,” Angus said. “It helps connect all these businesses together.”

Devens had developed a number of regulations, policies and guidelines over the years to address sustainability issues like noise and light pollution, resource management and conservation.

The new guidelines intend to reduce Devens’ embodied carbon footprint and will help the state meet its decarbonization goals. The Enterprise Commission gives an embodied carbon reduction checklist to each permit applicant early in the process, and applicants respond to each item, indicating their ability to incorporate them into their project.

“The earlier we get them, the easier it is to integrate these measures into their design,” Angus said.

The commission worked in consultation with the Sustainable Performance Institute to identify incentives for green approaches to development, and the Carbon Leadership Forum provided a number of resources.

Angus said the guidelines have received mostly positive reviews, and Devens now has the potential to have its first all-electric commercial building.

“The first project we had, I was pleasantly surprised when they submitted the checklist and saw that yes, they are considering embodied carbon in all of their building products and materials,” Angus said.

He said the owner was initially considering extending a natural gas line to the building, at significant cost, but was able to use the green building checklist to reduce energy consumption and avoid the need for gas.

Angus said the focus of the sustainability initiatives is to inform, educate, incentivize and then regulate. The new carbon guidelines might become regulations at some point in time.

A key part of the process is helping applicants see the significant savings potential, as well as the environmental components. One of the biggest challenges, Angus said, is getting applicants to think beyond their “first costs” to long-term or operational costs.

Angus noted Cambridge and Boston as cities doing work related to embodied carbon, in part to meet climate action plan goals.

“All these measures that are incorporated to reduce carbon end up producing more resilient buildings that are stronger, able to withstand longer power outages and more frequent and intense storms that are coming with climate change,” Angus said.

“Our mindset is to show [developers] how this is going to benefit them as well — not just our goals, but how it’s going to meet their goals.”