Category: OnTrack Series
OnTrack: Our Journey to Net Zero
In the last few years, several ominous phrases have crept into our daily lexicon including “atmospheric rivers”, “quarantining”, “social distancing”, and “air-quality index.” Oxymorons are also taking over our headlines such as “stormy California” and “rainy Arizona.” Spurred by the pandemic and climate crisis, the world is changing faster than ever before – and our ...
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OnTrack | Whose Carbon Is It Anyway? The Structural Engineer’s Role
November 3, 2026 General GS Sustainability OnTrack Series
Whose Carbon Is It Anyway: The Structural Engineer’s Role Quick question for the structural engineers in the room: is tracking embodied carbon part of your job? If your answer was “only when the client asks,” we have some news, and it comes with a document attached. PRACTICE ADVISORY: EMBODIED CARBON CONSIDERATIONS FOR STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS On …
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OnTrack | In Plain Sight: Embodied Carbon Tracking Built Into Drawings
October 21, 2026 GS Sustainability OnTrack Series
Most embodied carbon numbers live somewhere a structural engineer has to go looking for them — a spreadsheet, a one-off report, a slide buried halfway through a design meeting. By the time anyone outside the sustainability team sees the figure, the decision that produced it is already made. To make embodied carbon performance more visible …
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OnTrack: Beyond Conventional Practice: How One Inch Changed a Building
July 22, 2026 General GS Sustainability OnTrack Series
A floor slab may look like one line item in a structural concept, but it influences almost every part of the building: from ceiling heights and mechanical coordination to embodied carbon and long-term performance. In Vancouver, the typical floor system is a conventional 8-inch reinforced concrete slab. This system has become the industry standard as …
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OnTrack: The Low-Carbon Sweet Spot: How This Hotel Leads the Way
May 7, 2026 General GS Sustainability OnTrack Series
What actually drives lower embodied carbon in high-rise buildings? In February’s post, we reviewed a dataset of 26 projects issued for construction in 2025 and one particular project stood out. Not because it used new materials or unconventional systems, but because of how deliberately it was refined. Across the dataset, three strategies consistently led to lower …
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OnTrack: ECAP Recap: Our Commitment to SE2050
April 1, 2026 General GS Sustainability OnTrack Series
Just like tax season, our sustainability commitments involve annual reporting each spring. This provides an opportunity to reflect on both progress and constraints of the previous year, and to take stock of all that was achieved. Glotman Simpson is proud to be a signatory of the Structural Engineering Institute’s SE2050 movement and the Climate Smart Buildings …
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OnTrack: From Basements to Benchmarks: What Drives Embodied Carbon
February 27, 2026 GS Sustainability OnTrack Series
We analyzed twenty-six projects – ranging from 9,000 m2 to 115,000 m2 – to calculate our firms Embodied Carbon intensity (ECI) in 2025. These projects varied in building typologies and the chart below summarizes the key ECI measurement compared to primary building use (data point colour), the building height (x-axis), and the size of the …
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