If I asked you whether a building’s Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) was important to you, I would most likely get a resounding “Yes!” answer. But what if I asked you about that same building’s Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), would the answer be more of a hesitant “yes?” It’s easy to toss around TLA’s (three letter acronyms) when discussing building health and comfort, but if everyone isn’t on the same page someone could get lost.

“What on earth is that?” you may ask.   Quite simply it is the measurable energy that was required to create something.  To make a brick, the clay had to be dug out of the ground, transported to the brick factory, added to other ingredients (that also had to be gathered and transported), mixed together, fired in a kiln, loaded on a pallet, shipped to a project to be installed by a mason.  The final measure of embodied energy is the cost of demolishing or deconstructing an item for disposal.  All of those steps take energy and each of those steps also come at an environmental cost such as air and water pollution through creation and transportation.