RESET® Embodied
RESET Embodied (previously known as RESET Materials) is a data-driven standard for evaluating the health, safety, and ecological performance of building materials and products in projects. It is the world's first standard, built from the ground-up, to leverage cloud software and its ability to rapidly score both products and projects.
RESET Embodied empowers project teams to make informed decisions based on individual product performance data. By documenting and evaluating materials and products at a level of detail and scale that is new to the industry, RESET Embodied is a foundational step towards circularity and accounting for buildings as material banks.
RESET Embodied can be applied to new construction as well as operations and maintenance of existing projects.
RESET Embodied v2 is currently in an advanced Pilot phase, with projects being scored by users working alongside the RESET team. If you are interested in submitting a pilot project, please contact us at info[at]reset.build.
To learn more the RESET Embodied Standard, click below to download the RESET Embodied (Materials) Introduction Deck.
file_downloadRESET Embodied - Intro and Standards Download
The RESET Embodied Standard is available for free. It is a great reference for any project that wants to have a system and format for collecting materials data.
Projects leveraging the RESET Embodied Standard can opt-in to becoming a RESET Embodied Project, where it can be RESET Accredited. Click here to read more information on project accreditation.
1. What is the RESET Embodied Standard?
The RESET Embodied Standard is a data-driven standard for collecting and organizing materials data for the built environment.
RESET Embodied breaks down a project into the individual materials used and scores them, taking into consideration data aspects including data source, transparency, relevance, specificity, as well as data reporting and data platform requirements.
Components
The RESET Embodied Standard currently consists of 3 components, each with their individual data requirements and scoring:
Embodied Carbon
Accounting for carbon emissions from building material sourcing, transportation, and construction.
Embodied Circularity
Total circularity accounting for products and projects, including source of life (SOL) and end of life (EOL).
Accounting Methods
The RESET Embodied Standard uses two distinct, yet complimentary, accounting methods:
Elemental
This approach considers all products equally, irrespective of weight, quantity, or budget contribution. It empowers project teams to score and benchmark ALL projects rapidly and cost-effectively, tracking firm-wide progress from project-to-project and/or year-to-year.
Weighted
This approach adjusts the contribution of products to projects based on quantity, weight, and/or budget. This approach yields project carbon footprint emissions, circularity rates, and health content.
2. The Intent of RESET Embodied
Building materials and products are the DNA of our entire built environment, largely pre-determining the health and environmental impact of buildings before they are even built, during construction, operations, and long after they are gone. As a result, there is hardly a more important topic than that of assessing and selecting building materials based on health, safety, and ecological metrics.
Unfortunately, the industry as a whole has been crippled by the lack of material data standardization. Coupled with the difficulty of obtaining data on materials and products and the overall complexity of material assessments has resulted in material data as being one of the more contentious areas in building design.
RESET Embodied was developed and built from the ground-up to completely rethink how to assess and analyze data as it pertains to materials, products, and finishes intended for installation and use in the built environment. By developing advanced software and tapping into a network of connected databases, the RESET Embodied approach takes what was formerly disparate data and makes it accessible, actionable, and scalable for a global community.
Intent
The intent of the RESET Embodied Standard is:
Help good products succeed faster and bad products fail faster.
Bring scale to the specification and installation of environmentally regenerative, safe and healthy materials, products and equipment in the built environment.
Help project teams make sense of complex data.
Simplify and accelerate the assessment of complex materials and products for projects, empowering highly informed and impactful levels of decision making.
Help project teams produce real data for real-estate, turning risk into opportunity.
Standardize data quality and data availability on an international scale, empowering reliable and actionable ESG reporting and benchmarking.
Help project teams spend more time on the fun parts of projects.
Leverage software to automate repetitive data-driven processes, liberating project teams to spend time on innovative solutions to ecological, social, and economic regeneration.
Help spread best-practice knowledge.
Foster awareness through education and open communication.
3. RESET Embodied as a Data Standard
RESET Embodied's fundamental approach to data requirements can be divided into 3 parts:
Completeness
RESET Embodied standardizes the structure and format for collecting material information for a built environment project. A proper materials list provides a holistic view of how a project impacts the environment as well as the actions done in consideration of sustainability and occupant health.
The completeness of materials data highlights how much data was gathered and incentivizes the industry to ask for more material transparency and access.
Quality
In line with other RESET Standards, RESET Embodied is first and foremost a standard for data quality, designed to make performance data reliable, comparable, and actionable.
Within RESET Embodied, product performance data is first assessed and scored based on reliability (trust) and actionability. Products are then scored for data completeness and performance. RESET sets requirements for how the data is reported and connected to guarantee transparency and access via analysis and reporting.
The quality of data verifies that the data is true and reflects the actual situation.
Performance
RESET Embodied is performance-based, but does not set any performance targets.
Instead, RESET Embodied will leverage the RESET Leaderboard, where projects will be benchmarked anonymously against each other with the goal of highlighting projects that excel so other projects can learn more about the solutions and services they leverage.
4. How to Use the RESET Embodied Standard
RESET Embodied can be easily applied to either new or existing buildings.
The RESET Embodied Standard is applicable to two different project typologies, Commercial Interiors and Core & Shell, which have been separated to help tenants, operators, and owners achieve healthy performance targets by clearly defining and communicating their respective roles and responsibilities.
RESET Embodied for Commercial Interiors
RESET Embodied for Commercial Interiors (CI) focuses on the evaluation of building materials and products used in the fit-out of interiors, inclusive of substructure, furniture, finishes, and equipment.
RESET Embodied for Core & Shell
RESET Embodied for Core & Shell (CS) focuses on the evaluation of building materials and products used in the construction of buildings structures and envelopes, inclusive of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems.
5. Project Accreditation
On top of the RESET Embodied Standard, a project can pursue RESET Embodied Project Accreditation, which provides additional measures of trust via third party audits.
Note that there is no RESET Embodied Project Certification because there will be no hard performance targets to hit for certification. Instead, RESET Embodied Projects that are accredited will be added into the RESET Leaderboard for anonymous benchmarking.
RESET Embodied Project Accreditation is a great way to market the actions being taken by a built environment towards global sustainability and health.
6. Special Targets
The RESET Embodied Standard includes Special Targets' Certificates that can be awarded to project teams that fulfill the requirements:
Embodied Carbon Neutral Certificate
Achieved embodied carbon neutrality with the help of externally financed offsets.
Sample Special Target certificate below:
7. Next Steps
RESET Embodied is currently in development, with plans to release the draft and enter peer review and piloting phases in 2021 and 2022. Target date for official release will be in near the end of 2022.
Call for Project Pilots: If there are any projects that want to leverage RESET Embodied to highlight their progress towards net-zero carbon, please reach out to us at info[at]reset.build.
Guidance for Material Manufacturers: If there are any material manufactures who are interested in getting a RESET Embodied Score and need guidance, please also reach out us at info[at]reset.build.
8. Download the RESET Embodied (Materials) v2 Standard
All of the PDFs for the RESET Embodied (Materials) Standard can be found below: