Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is Precast Protects Life, Healthy Buildings. My name is Nicole Clout, Marketing Manager at PCI, and I will be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenter for today, I have a few introductory items to note. Earlier today, we sent a reminder email to all registered attendees. The email contained a webinar attendance sign-in sheet, a guide to downloading your Certificate of Continuing Education, and a PDF of today's presentation. The handouts are also available now and can be found in the handout section located near the bottom of your GoToWebinar toolbox. If there are multiple listeners at your location, please circulate the attendance sheet and send the completed sign-in sheet back to PCI per the instructions on the form. The attendance sheet is only for use at locations with multiple listeners on the line. 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As PCI has met the standards and requirements of the Registered Continuing Education Program, we will upload attendance data to www.rcep.net within 10 days, and you can print your Certificates of Continuing Education. Your login name at www.rcep.net is your email address, so please do not leave that blank if you are completing the sign-in sheet. We need your email address to get your certificate for this course. The course description is precast pre-stressed concrete as a durable material that is well known for its strength and resilience and ability to protect the lives, livelihoods, and the lifestyles of people and communities. Part of that equation is contributing to safe and healthy spaces in which occupants can live and work. This presentation will discuss how precast concrete can be used to create safe and healthy spaces. Learning objectives for this webinar include learning about attributes, benefits, and considerations of using precast concrete in the holistic design of healthy buildings, understanding what a healthy building is, as well as related programs and definitions to measure them, discovering ways that precast concrete contributes to indoor environmental quality, fire and life safety, acoustics, daylighting, and more, and case studies highlighting healthy buildings that utilize precast concrete to accomplish their goals. Our presenter for today is Jim Schneider, Executive Director of PCI Mountain States. I will now hand the controls over to the presenters so we can begin our presentation. Thank you very much, Nicole, and thanks to PCI for hosting me today. I'm just going to get my screen up here for everybody to see. All right. One second. And thanks, everybody, for being here. Thanks for joining us today to talk about healthy buildings. I think it is a very important topic, and it is increasingly being recognized, as we obviously have been talking about a lot of different considerations when it comes to sustainable building construction, resilient building and construction for many years. It is also super important to reflect on the fact that buildings are there for occupants, after all. Humans spend about 90 percent of our time inside of buildings, so occupant health is really becoming a piece of greater focus. Right now, the U.S. Green Building Council is kind of going through the final stages of preparing LEED version 5, which I know has a good focus on healthy buildings, and there's been more attention being paid to this topic. So it's one I think it's important to keep in mind as you're thinking about good design in general. And so when we're talking about a healthy building, there are a lot of reasons that we are concerned about this. Of course, we've talked in the past about things like sick building syndrome and how different types of materials inside of a space can make people sick or create health concerns or are difficult for people with either physical or sensory sensitivities. And so it's being aware of some of those types of things. And I do think that kind of the metric has shifted on this, even particularly post-COVID, when we all started looking at indoor spaces in a slightly different way. A lot of folks moved out of the office and now are going back. So how do we create office spaces that feel safe, comfortable, and accommodating to good health? So the World Health Organization estimates that about 25 percent of all diseases globally are attributable to the environment, resulting in about 12 million deaths annually. So reducing the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals is an important component of keeping interior spaces healthy. And again, humans spend about 90 percent of their time. Backing up a little bit, I guess, just to quickly say, this comes from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It has these different pillars of health when they're talking about a healthy building. Indoor health, resource health, economic health, and environmental health. So we just talked about indoor health. Resource health is talking about the fact that buildings are, of course, the largest, most resource-intensive product on the planet. The building and construction industry utilizes like a bigger percentage of the global materials flow each year than pretty much anything else. So the land needed for cities, the materials and water needed for buildings, and the waste generated by buildings put a strain on global resource health. So green building strategies, net zero approaches, and green chemistry principles hold promise to minimize the adverse effect of buildings on our natural systems and resources. Economic health, also a very big component of this. It's important to think about the economics of this as well. I'm a big believer in the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. All of these things have to be addressed. So green building principles and ideologies minimize environmental impacts, support construction jobs, higher property values, and conditions for higher worker productivity. For owners and developers, green buildings result in a 3% higher rent premiums and 7% higher cash flow as well as higher occupancy rates and transactional prices. For tenants, employees in green buildings regularly report greater indoor air quality and fewer sick building symptoms in green buildings. So it's something that a lot of larger companies are thinking quite a bit about as well because it gets down to employee attraction and retention, productivity, all of these things. You want to have a healthy space so that you attract the best talent and are able to keep them and that they're able to actually focus on doing their jobs and not on their health. So environmental health, another piece of this. Buildings are responsible for about 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions and that warm planet. It's one of the biggest opportunities to improve environmental health. So it needs to come from the building sector. We have a very big footprint and so any difference we can make on reducing our impact is important. So thinking about what a healthy building is, once again that same TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard published these nine foundations of a healthy building. We're looking at ventilation, air quality, thermal health, moisture, dust and pests, safety and security, water quality, noise, lighting, and view. So precast concrete can have a positive impact on many of those foundations, pretty much all of them with the exception of ventilation and water quality. So we can make a difference in air quality, in thermal health, moisture, dust and pests, safety and security, noise, lighting, and views. Advantages to healthy buildings. Once again, they provide safety and well-being to occupants and users, create a comfortable environment for those inside, encourage greater productivity, focus, and engagement. People are much more willing to spend time in spaces they feel are healthy, safe, and comfortable. And this is whether we're talking about an office or a school or a retail space or a municipal space, anything. Having it be welcoming, comfortable, and healthy just makes people want to be there. And that's something that's good for owners and businesses in general. So precast concrete is a healthy material for a number of reasons. And again, I should always say, like, I think when we're talking about whether it's sustainability, healthy buildings, energy efficiency, any of these things, materials themselves are part of the equation. And it's kind of how we utilize them. Like, different materials have different considerations and benefits. And when it comes to healthy buildings, these are some of the ways that a material like precast concrete can help to contribute. For one, it contributes to good indoor air quality in that it is an inert material. It doesn't have volatile organic chemicals or off gas or anything like that. It can enable thermal efficiency and comfort. It's got qualities that are helpful there. It has good sound attenuation properties for acoustic design. Flexibility can aid in daylighting design and make sure that you get those views and the proper light from natural light from outside that does help to create those comfortable, productive environments. Passive fire resistance, safety again being part of the equation. It is a non-combustible material and stands up very well against fire. Also, protection from multi-hazards such as storms, earthquakes, fires, et cetera. And that gets into some of the life safety resilience piece with precast. So, measuring healthy buildings, this is something that's really come up I think in the last several years that this has become more of a thing that certain developers, owners, architects are seeking. And one of the ways that you measure healthy buildings is through some of these certification programs. For example, well building. And this is one that many people have probably heard of, but the well building standard is a performance-based system for measuring, certifying, and monitoring features of the built environment that impact human health and well-being through air, water, nourishment, light, fitness, comfort, and mind. A well is managed and administered by the International Well Building Institute, which is a public benefit corporation whose mission is to improve human health and well-being through the built environment. Well is grounded in a body of medical research that explores the connection between the buildings where we spend more than 90% of our time and the health and wellness of their occupants. Well-certified spaces and well-compliant core and shell developments can help create an environment that improves nutrition, fitness, mood, and sleep patterns for people. The well building standard is third-party certified by the Green Business Certification Incorporation, GBCI, which is, if you've dealt with LEED, you're familiar with them as well. It also administers the LEED certification program, so there's a relationship there. And well has these seven concepts for healthier buildings. This is kind of the categories or pillars that they work from, air, water, nourishment, light, fitness, comfort, and mind. Another program that's out there that has kind of, I think, come up in prominence a little bit the last few years as well is FITWELL. So FITWELL is a certification system committed to building health for all. It's generated by an expert analysis of 7,000-plus academic research studies. It kind of has its roots in the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the General Services Administration. So the CDC remains a research and evaluation partner for FITWELL, and the Center for Active Design was selected as a licensed operator of the program, so they're charged with expanding FITWELL to the global market. So it was designed, FITWELL was by experts in public health, facility management, and design, supported by those studies I mentioned. About 49% of building owners are willing to pay more for buildings demonstrated to have a positive impact on health. About 81% of companies practice some social responsibility reporting, and 45% of investors own impact investments or are interested in these concepts. So responsible investing is on the rise, which is why some of these things like FITWELL or well building or these types of focuses are increasingly important to different types of organizations. Investors increasingly looking to environmental, social, and governance performance, so making investment decisions, while of course in many corridors right now that term isn't particularly being adored, let's say. It's maybe being pulled back on in some areas. We are still certainly seeing that the concepts behind it, the basic sustainability, healthy buildings, some of these other basic precepts are still certainly on the minds of investors. So these types of certifications are intended to respond to that market, offering strategies for developing and maintaining optimum health and promoting environments that boosts overall performance of companies. So FITWELL has a scorecard essentially that has these different types of categories on it. Location, building access, outdoor spaces, entrances and ground floor, stairs, indoor environment, workspaces, shared spaces, water supply, prepared food areas, this gets into like vending machines and snack bars, clearly Precast doesn't have a lot to do there, and emergency preparedness. So it's a very complete program, it's kind of interesting to really get into the weeds of thinking about what constitutes a healthy environment that goes beyond the building itself. So there's a lot for that one to look at as well. Other programs also address healthy buildings in one way, shape, or form. As I mentioned, USGBC's LEED has always had some kind of component related to indoor environmental quality or something like that. But there's certainly I'm seeing an increased emphasis on healthy buildings in the new version of LEED, LEED 5. Living Building Challenge is another one, one of the seven categories, which are called PEDALS. And that program is health and happiness, so that gets into a lot of these concepts. And then the HPD Collaborative Health Product Declarations provide a full disclosure of potential chemicals of concern in products by comparing product ingredients to a set of priority hazard lists based on the green screen for safer chemicals and additional lists from other government agencies. So this is to say that we have to, I think, when we think about buildings in general, this is, you know, all parts of it inside and out. We have to think beyond first costs and first impacts and really think holistically and build for tomorrow, not just today. Lifecycle perspective means making decisions that take into account health and well-being, long-term operating expenses, environmental impact, maintenance, and overall longevity. What is this building going to do, not just when we open it, but for all the people who occupy it day after day after day for this year, next year, for decades from now. So I want to kind of go over some of those different categories that we talked about of consideration about healthy buildings. One, of course, being indoor environmental quality, which is probably the first thing that really comes to mind when we're talking about healthy buildings. So why is indoor air quality important in this case? Indoor air quality is a global issue. Both short and long-term exposure to indoor air pollution can cause a range of health issues, including respiratory diseases, heart disease, cognitive deficits, and cancer. As one prominent example, the World Health Organization estimates that about 3.8 million people worldwide die every year from illnesses attributable to harmful indoor air. That comes from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. EPA reports that volatile organic compounds, VOCs, often cause eye, nose, and throat irritation, nausea, and can also damage the liver, kidney, and central nervous systems. These are especially harmful to people with chemical sensitivities. It's important to utilize materials that reduce the amount of harmful chemicals in the indoor environment. It's a good idea to, when possible, use low-emitting materials. Here's an area where something like precast concrete can help contribute. Using precast walls reduces the off-gassing attributed to other materials. In the case of using a precast insulated sandwich wall panel, which is what you're seeing the inside shot of this here, this is from a dormitory project that has insulated precast wall panels. You can actually use the interior face of the precast wall panel as your finished indoor wall. You don't need to have finishes or painting or coatings. Because precast is inert, it doesn't require VOC-based preservatives like some other products do. Textured interior walls can provide aesthetic alternatives to VOC-emitting paints or wallboard. Concrete is also inorganic and doesn't permit the growth of mold. It's a vapor barrier, so it helps to keep moisture out of the equation as well, which is super important in preventing mold and other types of damage to the building. Moisture management is important for a number of reasons. First of all, mold is, of course, the one that comes straight to mind. Because if moisture ends up somewhere in the building envelope where it doesn't belong, you can have an issue with mold, which causes lots of health problems. So for mold to actually happen requires a combination of the following conditions. First of all, fungal spores settling on the surface. And really, those are quite literally everywhere. So that is something that just is out in the world. Oxygen has to be available, which I would assume a good, healthy indoor environment for occupants has oxygen. I certainly hope so. Optimal temperatures between 40 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Room temperature, pretty usual expectation there. Nutrient available, wood, paper, cellulose-based materials. So again, just about any interior space you're gonna be in meets those requirements. So what this boils down to then is that the one thing that is necessary for mold that we can really control is moisture. So liquid or relative humidity above 70% in combination with those other factors is what's gonna cause an issue with mold. So the first four conditions are met in just about every building. The key remaining factor is moisture, which can be controlled by adhering to sound construction practices. So in terms of moisture management, we have to manage moisture directly. We do that through preventing leaks, maintaining flashing at joints, roofs, et cetera, making sure that moisture doesn't come directly into the building from rain or other sources. Vapor diffusion. Now, this is the process by which water vapor migrates through a wall system and its components, whether that be gypsum, concrete, insulation, or paint. At a molecular level. Moisture through exfiltration or infiltration, that's air that goes in and out through the envelope on various cracks or fissures or anything like that. You know, air naturally moves through and brings moisture with it. And then moisture condensation. This is when moisture vapor turns to a liquid on interior surfaces due to relative humidity and temperature. So basically all of this stuff are things that we have to think about in the building enclosure to make sure that we're managing those elements. Of course, to make sure it's a tight envelope and we don't have obvious leaks happening, but then it is making sure that we're monitoring things like temperature and pressure and where a dew point might occur and where moisture could occur in a wall system if we're not paying attention to condensation, things like that in relative humidity. So the thing about precast is that it is, first of all, a barrier wall, an air barrier. So there's no measurable leakage. It's very dense, low porosity. You don't really get that kind of leakage through the material itself. So that's a big, helpful step right there. Now to control heat, air, and moisture. And we're talking about moisture that goes along with heat and air because they're all elements of the environment and physics that all work together. So we have to use integral continuous insulation, which is pretty much required and we use it on most buildings. And with something, as an example, like a precast sandwich wall panel, it's integral in the system. You have on those wall panels, an interior wife of precast resource concrete and an exterior wife, and then in between a layer of insulation continuous that's sandwiched between them, held together by ties made from a non-conductive non-metal material. So what that part does is eliminate or reduce thermal bridging. So thermal bridging is if you do have some kind of metal holding your wall system together, whether that's steel studs or any type of metal connector, that draws thermal energy through. Even if you have continuous insulation, it creates short circuits in that and brings down the effective R value of the wall, but also that creates areas where moisture can form because it is a cold spot and it creates a differential in temperature and pressure and everything. So we want to eliminate that. Also, we can utilize thermal mass as part of the wall system, which is a quality of concrete where it essentially acts like a thermal battery. It slowly absorbs and slowly releases heat. This is really helpful in helping to keep an even indoor temperature and also really good for energy efficiency and lots of other reasons, contributes to all of this as well. Now we want to prevent or reduce air infiltration, exfiltration, have that air barrier. Also, we want to have a vapor retarder or vapor barrier. So a vapor retarder is something that, you know, really severely limits the amount of water vapor that can come in. A barrier will stop it entirely, essentially. So reduce that vapor infiltration with one of those and then reduce concentration, condensation potential by controlling relative humidity and surface temperatures. So precast, and you know, here we're kind of using as an example that precast sandwich wall panel system, which you can see a cutaway drawing of here that can include an integral insulation as that type of system does. So that's already built right into it. Can essentially eliminate thermal bridging by using those non-conductive ties. So we don't have that issue. Has thermal mass. So it gives you that benefit as part of the system. Is an air barrier. Is a vapor retarder at three inches thick. It also then becomes a vapor barrier if you add insulation to that equation. So precast sandwich wall panel system can combine all of those into one efficient system. So that's a little bit about managing, you know, kind of the end pull open, making sure moisture, heat, and air is taken care of. Occupant comfort plays into this as well. So we've talked a lot about those last few slides in terms of energy efficiency and saving energy and best utilizing the resources of a building. And it also does certainly play into wellness and comfort is another part of this. So we have to think about comfort because again, these are human beings who are occupying a space and whether that's an office, a school, any place where somebody is going to be doing something or getting something done, you want it to be comfortable so that it supports productivity. So this comes from an article perceived in indoor environment and occupants. Indoor environmental conditions, that's thermal noise, light, indoor air quality may affect workers comfort and consequently their health and wellbeing as well as their productivity. A study aimed to assess the relations between perceived indoor environment and occupants comfort, examine the modifying effects of both personal and building characteristics. The highest association with occupants overall comfort was found for noise followed by air quality, light and thermal satisfaction. So these are all part of the occupant comfort equation, noise, air quality, light, thermal satisfaction. Sound design. So really when you really stop and think about it, things that can be distracting. If you're in an office and a lot of folks have worked in an open office environment or something like that, unwanted sound is definitely one of the biggest distractions or biggest limits to productivity that can happen. Unwanted sound that is allowed to enter from outside of a building can be distracting or even harmful to people inside. Sound flowing between rooms or spaces in a building in all directions can create similar negative indoor experiences. Controlling the transfer of unwanted sound between spaces reduces noise, improves the indoor environment, contributes to sustainable design and is ultimately good for the people who use the building. So good sound design means that you basically want sound to be focused and you want it to stay where it belongs. Good acoustics are important to overall indoor environmental quality and occupant comfort. Our ears are designed to hear sound from one direction. And if we get hit from sound on all sides, it reduces concentration and increases fatigue. This is particularly a sensitive issue for a lot of people who are neurodivergent or have sensory issues with, noise can be a real big distracting factor. And it really is for all of us, but for some people more than others even. Really it's being able to, when you're talking about acoustic design, you're first of all keeping unwanted outside noise out, but then you also wanna be sure that the space you're actually in has focused sound so that you can have a conversation and be able to engage with the person next to you without having to hear 15 conversations around you or other various noises. So when we talk about acoustic design, the measure we use is STC ratings or sound transmission class. So the ability of a barrier to reduce the intensity of airborne sound is designated by its STC rating. So STC 25 is where you can hear normal speech, can be understood pretty easily through a wall. Thinking back to a time I stayed at the Circus Circus in Las Vegas, I'm pretty sure that was probably STC 25 or below. 35 is a loud speech, audible, but not intelligible. So you might hear kind of a Charlie Brown wah, wah, wah. Onset of privacy comes at 40, STC 40. So this is where you're kind of getting there. STC 45 loud speech is not audible. And about 90% of statistical population would not be annoyed by any sound that does make it through an STC 45 barrier. STC 50, very loud sounds such as musical instruments or a stereo could be faintly heard. And 99% of the population not annoyed. STC 60 or plus is superior soundproofing, both sounds and audible. So here's where we're talking about auditoriums, some of those really where you really have to be concerned about sound coming in or out. So precast for sound attenuation, the inherent mass of precast concrete makes it an excellent sound barrier with STC ratings typically of about 55. As the unit weight of precast concrete wall or floor increases, the STC also increases. So precast concrete walls, floors and roofs typically do not require additional treatments to provide adequate sound insulation. Another area that this comes in quite a bit is when we're talking about something like hollow core planks, when that's used as flooring in a hotel or multifamily or a different type of structure, you don't hear the people walking around on top of you because you have that good STC block there. Now that all being said, you do have to address the fact that if you're in a large space with concrete, you can have some echo and that you may have to use some types of acoustic board or some type of dampening material that helps to control that. And that can be obtained by a resiliently attached layer of gypsum board or other absorptive sound material. So it's part of a larger sound design. As I kind of was talking about materials in general before, it's less that any particular material is a cure-all just on its own, it's how do you employ it? What is its qualities that are good that you can use it for? And with precast, very good as a sound barrier and keeping it out. So you may have to do a little work with the interior piece of it to make sure that the sound stays where it belongs. Precast concrete floors in combination with resilient materials can control impact sounds as I mentioned. You know, again, a common solution consists of good quality carpeting mounted on a resilient padding. So it's a good combination for those types of environment where you just don't want to hear everybody in the adjacent spaces around you. So there's a lot more information available about sound attenuation and sound design. PCI has got a lot of great resources on this as a designer's notebook on the topic of acoustics that's available for free. You can check that out at PCI bookstore, lots of good information there. Lighting design is another piece of the equation. So natural light has been shown to be an important element of occupant comfort and health. Daylighting creates a visually stimulating and productive environment for occupants in all buildings without undesirable side effects, such as glare, excess of contrast or reflection. Great and optimal daylighting is a combination of material design. It's not just like having wide open windows that you have to make sure that it's the right orientation at the right level of shading. So considerations include layout, site orientation, shading, all those things. But what precast can do with large open spans and big panels that give you lots of flexibility like you see here, just gives you a lot of room to work in your design to make sure you have a lot of flexibility in design. Those long spans allow open areas that are well suited for daylighting. And you can see an example of that here in this cafeteria where they had double Ts on the roof and they spaced them out every other. So you can see the empty space between the different double Ts and that creates this huge opening for windows. And then you can have like a white type of paint or different types of materials that are light in color that can give you a nice light bounce and create a very welcoming feeling environment. Precast floor systems can span long distances with shallow floor plates, excuse me, and provide column free spaces to help achieve credits in those areas if you're looking at well building or lead or any of that or fit well. Precast can also be exposed on ceilings to reflect light deep into interior spaces. Interior temperature is another piece of it. I know we've all certainly been in those office experiences where one person is freezing on one side of the office and the other person is burning up on the other. So maintaining consistent interior temperature helps facilitate greater concentration, focus and productivity. Precast can help create energy efficient, comfortable spaces. Thermal mass is one of those qualities that does help to contribute to this because it does slowly absorb and slowly release heat. It kind of creates an environment for an even release of temperature. And so you can kind of help keep an even temperature by using its qualities, which are just there naturally. It's a piece of physics, but it can really contribute to consistent and comfortable indoor spaces. You know, as I mentioned, thermal mass has this benefit of kind of offset, you know, the heat, thermal energy goes through it slowly. So what this shows is kind of an energy efficiency, but also a thermal comfort piece. This metal or wood frame wall here, you can see the peaks happen at the peak hours of the day. So that means the HVAC has to work harder to keep the building cool. Whereas with thermal mass, that thermal energy comes through at a later time because it takes longer, which, you know, saves on peak energy, but also more importantly, the peak is much smaller and that gets that even temperature release thing. So it just helps to create an energy efficient, comfortable environment. And just as an example of what this can mean in terms of R value, when you're looking at your envelope design, this is an example of what a material R value of a precast sandwich wall panel might look like with seven and a half inches of concrete inside and two and a half inches out with two inches of XPS insulation. All that adds up to a material R value of 11.65, but you can actually run calculations on R value with utilizing thermal mass. In this case, a wall like that, in this case study in Fresno, California, has a material R value of 11.33, but performs at 26.1. So it doubled pretty much the R value of the wall and they were allowed to downsize their HVAC equipment by 37% in tonnage. Once again, this is a big energy saver, but also helps to create that interior comfort. That's what's so important. Life safety. So all of this is great. Wellness and comfort, you know, when it comes to the compounds that a person is exposed to inside and also the light, sound, and all the other things we've talked about. But at the end of the day, a building also must protect the basic life of its occupants from any kind of exterior threats. So the first responsibility is to protect the lives and safety of the occupants. Life safety is an important consideration when you're thinking about healthy buildings or any kind of construction. And a building should keep those inside safe from threats like fire, severe storms, earthquakes. So first of all, fire. I mean, obviously fire is the oldest enemy of buildings. Probably there is, like we've always said, contend with fire and materials that are flammable. So we have to think about how we design for fire safety to make sure that people are safe in the event of a fire situation. So the way fire code is set up, I think kind of gives us an instructive way to view it. The way fire code is kind of prioritized is first priority is to protect life. Of course, allow occupants to exit safely and create a situation where people can get out and be safe. Second, minimize the impact of fire on the building itself, the contents inside and on adjacent property. So first priority to protect the people, second priority, let's see what we can do to protect the building. Third is to assist fire services in responding to the fire. So when thinking about those considerations and precast concrete as how it contributes to a balanced fire resistant design. So first of all, precast is non-combustible. It is essentially fire resistant. It has a very high fire rating. And even if it experiences fire and damage could happen over time, it's minimized because it is just very strong and doesn't act as fuel for a fire. So you can provide fire rated walls, columns, beams, floors, roofs with this material. Helps provide compartmentalization within the building, which is the idea that, and it kind of gets to that life safety piece and also protecting the building. It's like, if there is a fire, you want to try to keep it contained to the area where it began and prevent its spread. So good compartmentalization within a building means that people are able to find a means of egress. And hopefully the fire is contained to an area that fire services can address. And in these types of cases, in a truly balanced fire design, which has both passive and active methods of prevention, suppression becomes an add-on safety feature with passive fire resistance in lieu of passive, of active fire resistance. So basically, you know, the sprinklers are there as a help and as a backup, but it's not your first line of defense. The first line of defense is to try to contain the fire and not have it get out of control in the first place. And, you know, some, of course, as we're talking about mass timber buildings and other types of construction that are going higher into higher rise territory, NFPA has released some studies just asking a few questions about what that means. It's in terms of compartmentalization and the types of structural systems found in tall buildings, it is important to think about using non-combustible materials as much as possible and try to prevent the spread of those types of fires. We have fire resistant resources available on the PCI website as well, specifications for fire resistance, lots of other standards and information as well. Along with fire, another thing we have to contend with increasingly is storms. Different parts of the country experience different kinds of, excuse me, storm events. I'm in Colorado, so out here we have a lot of hail and we also do have wildfires, getting back to those last slides, but parts of the Midwest, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, and then of course hurricanes on the coasts. So precast re-stressed concrete provides superior protection against the physical abuse that can be doled out by severe weather events like tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods. Inherently resistant, or resilient, excuse me, precast provides excellent protection against high winds, storm surge, scour, and flying debris. It's often used in FEMA shelters as well as residential, institutional, public, government, and other structures, requiring extra protection from the elements. Precast wall panels provide excellent resistance against flying debris, which can often become projectiles or missiles during a tornado or hurricane. One of the biggest threats in any severe storm is from windborne debris, just the stuff that gets kicked up, whether that's the tornado or even just a severe storm with high winds, that's a big threat to buildings. And as we look at the impacts of climate change and even as looking at weather maps around the country, what we've considered tornado alley, quote-unquote, has become about a third of the country. It's gotten wider over the years. We're seeing these types of storms spread in magnitude and in geography. So in response to that, we're thinking a lot more about storm safe design and the precast industry, a number of years ago, did some wall system tests for fortified buildings, testing the impact of a two-by-four wood stud traveling at about 100 miles an hour, which is the equivalent of windborne debris during a tornado with 250 mile an hour winds. And we actually have a video to show a little bit about what this looks like. So this wind cannon basically shot this two-by-four at a vinyl wood frame, brick and wood frame, steel and wood frame, and a precast concrete wall. So you can see, obviously, the vinyl and wood frame, it punctures it easily, it goes right through. I don't think there's any great surprise there, but that is one of the biggest threats, especially in a lot of residential construction. Brick and wood frame, even with that stronger material, you can see that the construction of that wall can't prevent the penetration of that projectile. Brick and steel frame offers more resistance, but clearly that wall is still compromised, damaged, people inside are put at risk. And finally, we have a precast sandwich wall panel, and you can see it bounces off pretty easily. If there's any damage to that wall, it's aesthetic and it's a touch-up rather than a truly damaged wall system and people inside who are put at threat. So this is why we do see precast used in a lot of FEMA-rated safe rooms, storm shelters, a number of different reasons. You have that protection against windborne debris that we just saw, but also things like the fact that using double-T roofs helps to protect against wind uplift forces that can also be an issue in something like a tornado. So we're seeing more of these safe rooms or storm shelters being designed in communities, sometimes as a gymnasium as part of a school. So FEMA requires all safe room buildings to be set with requirements for occupant density, debris mistal impact, a stand-up to direct wind speeds of 250 miles per hour. So precast can really lend a lot to those types of designs for reasons that you can see there. A few case studies I want to talk about that go into some of these elements. First of all, this one gets a little bit into some of the indoor air quality and comfort piece. This is Catholic University. They use a sandwich wall panel with a combination of thin brick and exposed concrete. So this kind of goes through a lot of the examples that we talked about. It's the moisture barrier. It's an air barrier. It's got good fire endurance rating, an SDC rating of 54. These are those photos we saw earlier of these finished walls using precast. So you get good indoor environmental quality, no off-gassing, good occupant comfort and energy efficiency. You can see that in this thermal imaging, none of the thermal energy is really escaping that. It just keeps the heat and cool where it's supposed to be. Another example is the South Carolina Children's Theater in Greenville, South Carolina. This was a project done by PCI certified producer Metromonts. In addition to meeting the requirements of structural fire and life safety codes, increased cooling capacity for crowds and lighting acoustics, the project team wanted to create a focal point for the community. With limited budget, the non-profit theater group needed a durable and versatile material that could also meet stringent acoustic and insulative demands. Precast concrete was well suited for that. So they were able to create a column-free space that's open and really good for performing arts. And the thermal mass of the concrete reduces the daily temperature swings and helping to reduce the impact of heating and cooling loads and also create more occupant comfort. The architect had this to say, we had to be creative with the use of materials to stay within budget. The theater has to be acoustically isolated, so the structure has to help with that separation. To isolate outside noise, you need mass. In the past, theaters were often constructed with various veneers and masonry block for the acoustic separation. But for this, Precast provided a perfect material to prevent outside noise from entering the space and they didn't have to do anything extra on the interior to achieve that. Hospitals are obviously a really great example and always leaders in this space. And we're talking about healthy buildings because they're obviously a very sensitive space where health and occupant wellness is front of mind. So this is kind of a cool example, Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. This project needed to deliver the kind of exceptional indoor environmental quality required for medical facilities. The building also had to meet high seismic design requirements to ensure life safety. Precast was able to contribute to both as well as deliver the desired aesthetic for both the adult and children's wing. During an earthquake, it's 126 base. Isolators will let the building move several feet in any direction without suffering major and horizontal direction without suffering major damage. And so it also has good daylighting and things like that. So this kind of gets the life safety and indoor environmental quality. Team evaluated the needs of healthcare workers and patients in their plan to build a healthcare facility for healing the whole body, spirit and mind while also being structurally sound. An example in the school, which is another place to really want to think about having safe and healthy environments. This is Mapleton, excuse me, Maple River K-12 school in Mapleton, Minnesota. This is a Wells project, part of a long range facilities plan. Several rural communities agreed to consolidate three separate schools into one single one that self-provide equal access and comfort. Majority of the classrooms were designed to work with standard hollow core plank sizing to keep spans low. They did a lot with daylighting in this one as well and used insulated and solid architectural wall panels for a structure of efficient structure. They had to live by, this had to have a storm shelter per state requirements. Precastor designed a 97 by 7 foot interior room strong enough to withstand an F5 tornado. This is another school in Kansas. This one is from StressCon here in Colorado, Garden City High School. This one is another area located prone to tornadoes, had to be ahead of a safe room, built the FEMA 361 standards. This is kind of an interesting story that happened in Salt Lake City. This is an apartment building that had a precast parking garage underneath with a wood frame construction apartment above it. Just before completion, the structure above caught fire, terrible fire, and took down the entire building. But even in that event of that severe fire, the concrete parking structure underneath was relatively undamaged and they were able to turn around with a quick repair and rebuild the building. So it shows how even in those types of severe fire events side by side, that precast can stand up to that type of abuse and still be able to be resilient and keep functioning. I do want to say a little bit, and I'll kind of go through these quickly, about sustainability because it's part of this whole equation too. We want these buildings to be healthy and good for occupants, but I know we also have to address environmental health and sustainability of our community. So we talk a lot about concrete having a carbon impact, which it does, but also the fact is that we're building at a rate that's really difficult to even wrap your head around. It's something like we build the equivalent of a new New York City about every three months, and that is not looking to slow down. Concrete is the most abundant human-made material on earth. It's necessary for the type of development we need for the future. So what we need to do is make sure that we do it in a way that is efficient and as sensitive to the environment and as decarbonized as possible. I'm just going to skip through some of these, but concrete is versatile, exposed, has architectural elements to it, and also structural. It's available anywhere pretty much. It's very abundant material, usually made from local materials, used everywhere on all kinds of different projects. And as I mentioned with the healthy building piece of it, all materials have something to contribute, and what pre-cast can contribute is durability and resilience, which we've kind of talked about, energy efficiency, life cycle performance, indoor environmental quality, material efficiency. We've touched on a lot of that in this presentation, but I do want to talk about the carbon piece of it because it is important. We do, while there are many holistic long-term benefits of using a material like pre-cast concrete for reasons of performance and safety and health and comfort and resilience, we also do have to address the initial carbon impact. So the concrete industry recognizes the need for immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Concrete does account for something like eight, nine percent of the global CO2 emissions. So bringing that number down is going to help the big picture worldwide. There are numerous new technologies and techniques that are emerging to help us with the initial impact. Some of our main goals as an industry are to reduce the use of traditional Portland cement, offset or mitigate the carbon emitted in the production of concrete, and also increase strength while reducing material use. PCA, which is the Portland Cement Association, has this 2050 roadmap to carbon neutrality that goes into some of these things. Part of it is right-sizing the amount of clinker in the cement and also, especially with something like pre-cast concrete, where this is a plant-produced product where we have a lot of control over the materials and mix design. It's about being very efficient about how we use the cement and how much of it we use, but there are even some improvements coming down the line in cement itself as we move away from traditional Portland cement. One of those that we're seeing already as happening as a transition is Portland Limestone Cement, or PLC, which is a blended cement with a higher limestone content. Works roughly the same, measures about the same, performs about the same as regular Portland cement. So obviously there's work that has to be done in mixed designs to make sure that we're hitting the performance marks that we need to, but it's a fairly relatively simple switch. Simple is overstating it, but it's usually a good one-to-one switch. But it can reduce carbon impact by about 10%. Now looking a little further down the line is something like limestone calcinated cement, or LC3, which is based on a blend of limestone and calcinated clay. This could get us to more of a 30% or 40% reduction in CO2, but there's still more work that has to be done to make sure that the mixed designs are appropriate and we're getting the level of performance that's necessary, which after all is still really the most important thing. We have to make sure that it performs and is structurally sound. And then we have supplementary cementitious materials that we use as replacement of percentages of cement in many mixes. A lot of these are pretty common use already in precast and other types of concrete. Fly ash is one of them. It's a coal byproduct, commercially available, finely divided residue that results from the combustion of pulverized coal. It's carried from the combustion chamber of the furnace by exhaust gases. Slag cement is another kind of waste material from iron blast furnace. This can also be used as a percentage of a replacement with some piece of the cement in the mix. Silica fume is another waste product. And then recycled glass, like crushed glass, can take on cement-like qualities when it reacts with water and cement. In some mixes, it can replace 20% to 30% of cement. We're also seeing some really cool research innovations happening with supplementary cementitious material using other types of approaches and materials like basalt. Cement is more environmentally friendly than Portland cement because it doesn't release CO2 when it's ground up into powder. Mine tailings, the Colorado School of Mines, is working on a research project to use mine tailings in the production of lightweight aggregates in construction industries. So that's kind of at a proof of principle stage right now. Biomass, short for biomass, up-cycled in lignin for decarbonizing energy-intensive materials is a research effort by National Renewable Energy Labs and Department of Energy using lignin, which is an abundant waste material from pulp and paper products, in replacement of cement. These produce 50% to 80% lower emissions and began to approach similar costs of cement-based concrete. There's even a project going on here, and I just met somebody involved with it recently at University of Colorado Boulder and some other universities using microalgae. Some species of single-cell microalgae can biologically grow limestone through photosynthesis, kind of like coral reef stew. So it's kind of an interesting approach too. So lots of different ways to think about what cement is, what it does, how we can replace it, use less of it, because that's really where much of the carbon impact of concrete comes from. So the less we can use traditional Portland cement, the better off our material gets. Recycled aggregate is another area that we're seeing some improvement. So, you know, getting into the idea of circular economy and reuse. So right now a lot of old, unneeded, crushed up and recycled as road fill or something like that, but we're actually seeing work being done to use that crushed up concrete as recycled aggregate in a new mix, at least to higher percentages, and see what we can do with that to create a more circular dynamic with concrete. There's also carbon capture technology, which basically takes industrial CO2 that's captured from plants and things like that, or from production facilities, factories, and then that's injected into concrete, which according to some claims can help with some of the curing qualities, but at very least it entombs the CO2 into the concrete essentially. Within the precast industry right now too, we are really working hard to track LCA data, life cycle assessment, and emphasize product transparency, improve processes for efficiency and sustainability. We want to gather as an industry environmental product declarations so that we can demonstrate baseline numbers now and show reductions of projects, continue to request those. As you think about EPDs and LCAs though, it's always important to recognize what type it is. Most importantly, the difference between cradle to gate and cradle to grave. A lot of the EPDs that are out there right now are cradle to gate, which basically covers the impacts of the material from sourcing through manufacturing right up to the point that the product is going to ship out of the factory gate. Cradle to grave takes into account the transportation of the job site, the construction, the maintenance, the operation of the building, everything to end of life. It's a much more complete picture. Right now, the data we have primarily keeps us in the cradle to gate area, whereas with concrete, unfortunately, most of its impact is in that production phase. Then it has the long life cycle where its performance is really good, and those cradle to grave analyses are certainly a lot more complete and friendly to the type of impacts that concrete has. It requires a lot more data and modeling to get to better numbers on that, but it's just important to know if you're looking at a cradle to gate versus cradle to grave, you're going to be looking at very different numbers. This just kind of breaks down to different stages. That first one, production, is what cradle to gate is. The rest of them are all part of cradle to grave. EPDs are being developed industry-wide or by specific companies all across the industry. We're getting pretty close as an industry to being able to release some regional EPDs pretty soon, and quite a few of our producers around the country have them, so that information is there and becoming more readily available. I know we're almost at time. I just want to quickly say that this is actually a cool case study in my neck of the woods in my region in Montana, a project that used concrete, completely made of recycled content, and using other alternatives to cement like crushed glass. This is the first LEED-certified platinum building in Montana. In summary, healthy buildings have significant benefits for the well-being and safety of occupants, and precast, prestressed concrete has numerous attributes that can contribute to the design of healthy buildings. It's an inert material, has no VOCs, and is good for indoor environmental quality, excellent sound attenuation, thermal comfort, and also durability and safety. I'm going to stop there. I know we still have a couple minutes, and in case there are any questions, I can try to answer one or two now, and certainly everyone can feel free to reach out to me as well with any questions they may have. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jim, for a great and informative presentation. We do have time for one or maybe two questions, so I'll start with the first one. What resources are available from PCI regarding sustainability and healthy buildings? Oh, great question. We do have a sustainability page that has quite a bit of this information, and Nicole, actually, is there a specific URL? I know I've been to that site, and you can get it from the main page, but it was Precast Protects Life gets into the life safety element, but we also do have a sustainability page that talks about a lot of those elements. Correct, yes. The best way to access that is, like you said, from the main home page, How Precast Builds, and then Precast Protects Life. So it's pci.org slash howprecastbuilds slash sustainability, and then we also have our Precast Protects Life video as well. Yes, lots of good resources there. Also, feel free to reach out to me. I've got a few other things as well. Perfect, and then that seems to be all the time we have for questions. So on behalf of PCI, I'd like to thank Jim again for a great presentation. If anyone does have any additional questions, you can reach out to marketing at marketing at pci.org, and we'll forward those questions to Jim so that he can reach back out to you, and then as a reminder, certificates of continuing education will appear in your account at www.rcep.net within 10 days. Thank you again, have a great day, and please stay safe.

precast concrete

healthy buildings

indoor environmental quality

sustainable practices

thermal efficiency

sound attenuation

fire resistance

LEED certification

carbon footprint