California widened its embodied carbon net this year: the CALGreen EPD mandate that used to apply only to buildings over 100,000 square feet now catches anything over 50,000. We've spent the last few months making that easier to address, built right into the place you're already working. This issue walks through what that looks like from detection to permit-ready package. We're also tipping our hats to this year's COTE Top Ten winners, eight of which work in C.Scale, and introducing you to a company rethinking what happens to a tree after it falls.
Brad Jacobson, FAIA
Co-Founder
FEATURE UPDATE
CALGreen compliance, start to finish
CALGreen Section 5.409.3 now requires EPD-backed documentation for concrete, steel, flat glass, and mineral wool on California projects over 50,000 sf. Until now that's meant EPD scavenger hunts and reconciling carbon numbers across spreadsheets. C.Scale now handles it end to end.
Today you can:
Detect applicability automatically. C.Scale reads your project location, size, use type, and completion year and flags whether CALGreen applies.
Find compliant EPDs and track status in real time. Search thousands of EPDs against CALGreen's GWP limits. Every regulated material row shows its current status: Compliant, Missing EPD, Over Limit, or Expired — including EPDs that will expire before project completion.
Export a permit-ready package. Easily produce the WS-5 worksheet, PDFs for all your EPDs, and a compliance summary spreadsheet with per-material GWP data your AHJ needs.
Coming soon:
LEED v4.1 EPD credits. Documentation mapped to Materials and Resources (MR) credits for Environmental Product Declarations and Building Life-Cycle Impact Reduction.
SE 2050 project data export. Structural material quantities exported directly into the SE 2050 import template.
The AIA announced the 2026 COTE Top Ten award-winning projects at the national conference in San Diego last month. The list spans typologies, including a fire station in Iowa, an embassy in Niger, affordable housing in San Francisco, a convention center in Seattle, and a music hall in Vermont. What connects them is a commitment to measuring and reducing impact from the start of design, not as a late-stage add-on.
Eight of the ten winning projects come from firms with unlimited C.Scale licenses: Perkins Eastman, HGA, LMN Architects, The Miller Hull Partnership, Lake Flato, OPN Architects, and Mithun. We don't think that's accidental. Firms winning this award tend to be the ones treating carbon data as a design input.
A few patterns stand out across the cohort: mass timber in three projects, all-electric systems throughout, and adaptive reuse holding its own as a high-performance strategy. Here's the TL;DR:
Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, Washington, D.C.: Net-zero energy school organized around a sky-lit learning commons.
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens – Phase 1, Sarasota, FL: Living Building Challenge-targeting campus with a 1.2 MW PV array and native Florida ecology.
Marlboro Music Reich Hall, Marlboro, VT: A cultural retreat and musical hall exceeding AIA 2030 targets and served by geothermal heating.
Seattle Convention Center Summit Building, Seattle, WA: The second largest LEED Platinum building in the U.S., and first high-rise convention center stacked vertically within the urban core.
Health Sciences Education Building, UW, Seattle, WA: Mass timber hybrid designed to reduce carbon and occupant stress in equal measure.
Trinity University Business & Humanities District, San Antonio, TX: New mass timber hall plus two renovated mid-century buildings; 52% embodied carbon reduction, zero potable water use for toilets.
Volta Studio, Portland, OR: Warehouse reuse supporting creative collaboration where minimal intervention did most of the sustainability work.
Marion Fire Station No. 1, Marion, IA: All-electric civic building where spatial sequence mitigates carcinogen exposure into living and office quarters.
Kapuso at the Upper Yard, San Francisco, CA:131 permanently affordable, all-electric homes at one of SF's busiest transit hubs.
U.S. Embassy Niamey, Niger: Passive-first campus built from local materials in Niger's sub-tropical climate.
Congratulations to all the design teams, and even more to the clients exhibiting this sorely-needed leadership.
LOW-CARBON PRODUCT OF THE MONTH
Cambium and the case for salvaged wood
Most urban trees that come down don't end up in a building. Storms take them, wildfire clearing removes them, demolition sends the rest to a landfill, and the country loses something like 45 million dry tons of this wood a year to mulching, burning, and rot. Every ton that decomposes or burns gives back the carbon it spent decades storing. Kept in a building instead, that carbon stays put.
Cambium is building the market for the wood that would otherwise be wasted, combining physical supply, advisory work, and a digital platform in an industry that still runs on paper and phone calls. Carbon Smart Wood is the flagship: salvaged domestic hardwoods and softwoods, white oak and Douglas fir among them, milled into millwork, furniture, and mass timber. Cambium tracks the carbon avoided on every order and documents chain of custody, reporting specific to Carbon Smart Wood rather than the full Cambium portfolio.
Salvaged supply is real but uneven, which raises the obvious question: can you design around this wood being available a year from now? It's the reason Cambium pairs supply with a digital advisory platform in the first place, giving specifiers a realistic read on availability instead of a guess, with an origin you can document, order by order.
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