Podcast: Michal Porter Talks Reducing Carbon Emissions and Advancing Sustainable Building Practices
Homebuyer interest in environmentally-friendly building materials is on the rise. To learn more about where the residential construction market is headed and how companies can stay ahead of this growing trend, we invited Michal Porter, senior lead scientist at Dupont, onto the latest episode of our Women at WIRC podcast.
During our conversation, Porter provided insights from her work advancing sustainable materials and construction practices and shared more about how others in the housing industry can get involved and do the same.
Listen to the full podcast episode:
Transcript:
Welcome back to Women at WIRC, where our editors from sister media brands—Pro Builder, Pro Remodeler, and Custom Builder—sit down with standout women across home building, remodeling, and design. We share their stories and business insights, and explore how women are reshaping the residential building industry.
Catherine Sweeney: Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Women at WIRC. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today. Her name is Michal Porter, and she's a senior lead scientist at DuPont’s performance building solutions business, which includes the Corian design brand. Michael has more than 16 years of experience in her field, particularly focusing on the advancement of sustainable materials and practices, which is what we're going to talk a little bit about today. So, hi, Michal. How are you?
Michal Porter: Hi, I'm very well. Thank you. I'm excited to be here to talk to you today.
Catherine: Thank you so much for coming on. For those who are unfamiliar with you and your work, can you talk a little bit about what it is exactly that you do?
Michal: Sure. As you said, I've been part of this business—we refer to it as the shelter business, along with Corian Design—most of my time in this business has been for the last 16, 17, years, working with foam products.
I'm a chemical engineer by training, so I know a lot about nucleation and growth of gas in a melted polymer, and of course, that is what provides the wonderful insulation power of many of our building insulation products today.
So I've spent a lot of time in the lab, a lot of time learning how to make that type of product, but more recently, I've had the privilege— DuPont has been very supportive in helping me to become better educated and even trained to do some basic life cycle assessment modeling. And what we've seen with the industry is that's a critical component of product innovation for the built environment, because as we look beyond just energy efficiency and the carbon emissions associated with operating our built environment, we also now understand that the materials we put into those buildings and structures come with an embodied carbon, and really, to understand where that is and how to reduce it, you really have to be educated in the the area of life cycle assessments.
So I've been doing a lot of more of that internally, for our existing products and for, you know, future products that we work on. It's a fascinating field, and I'm really excited to learn more about it.
Catherine: And how long have you been doing that?
Michal: Oh, goodness. So just out of self talk, curiosity, and learning more about how the industry has been talking about that, I would say at least five years, but more formal training, it's been in the last two to three years. We've always had to work, I think since 2014 the built environment, of course, building products, you've started to see more environmental product declarations, which I'm sure we can talk about a little bit more. But with that kind of growing trend in the industry, businesses such as mine really had to become a little bit well versed in the terminology around those documents and the LCA studies that go on to support those. So, it's over the last five to six years, it's become more of a focus.
Catherine: So you mentioned LCAs and you mentioned EPDs, can you sort of elaborate on that process. And you know, in your opinion, why are these assessments becoming more and more important?
Michal: Yes, so as we look to climate change, as a planet, as a globe, you know, we have these goals of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels. So the science based targets initiative, you know, and other organizations have really put out a roadmap in order to achieve that.
There's targets around how much emissions on an annual basis we can afford to continue to emit. So you cannot manage what you don't measure, and LCA is one of the most important ways to understand where the carbon comes from.
So in terms of a product, if you want to understand what's the impact to the environment of your product, you can do it on a raw material, you can do it on a product, or you can do it on a service even.
And what it allows you to do is look at that product or service or material, and you look at what are all the inputs coming in and the outputs to waste and emissions associated with the product itself. And then, through a modeling software and data base, you can start to estimate what are the impacts, the environmental impacts of your product just from the fact that you're sourcing raw materials.
You have a manufacturing process. You transport your raw materials and your product to your customer. It gets used, and then it eventually will have an end of life where it gets disposed of, or hopefully reused or recycled, all of that kind of culminates together into an impact to the environment.
We think about global warming potential, or, you know, CO2 emissions associated with all of those steps, but there's also other environmental impacts. So a life cycle assessment looks at all those environmental impacts, not just carbon emissions, but it looks at, you know, water usage, things like eutrophication and ozone depletion and other important aspects.
But as you know, we're really focused on climate change right now, and so global warming potential is one of them, the impacts that come out of an LCA that get the most attention right now.
Catherine: With your experience and in the work that you're doing, would you say that the general trend is sort of going this way, or what kind of work needs to be done on that front still?
Michal: So, a lot of the products we make, you know, go into commercial buildings, but we do have a place in the residential market. And what I've noticed over the last few years, let's say three to four years, is that the commercial space was very much the first area of the built environment to really start paying attention to embodied carbon, things like the LEED certification program. You know, it really highlighted the need to really drive that down in our building products.
But in more recent years, we're starting to see residential building companies pay attention to that and start talking about emissions, not just operational emissions, but the embodied carbon associated with the building products.
Our sustainability director Shawn Hunter, attended some conferences just a couple years ago and was really blown away at some of the dialog he heard in that residential space. So I do think that the conversation has really picked up volume in the residential space itself.
What I would love to see is, when I think about residential I think about the people that live in those spaces, and new construction is where embodied carbon is really, you know, a strong topic, not so much existing buildings, but with new construction, I think about the people that are choosing to invest in, you know, residential buildings or individual homes, and what I would like to see the residential market do is kind of make it better understood to the end customers, so homeowners that are looking to build a new home. Help them understand what embodied carbon is. What does it mean to source low carbon materials? How does it benefit me and really get those, those final customers really bought into the idea. That's what I would love to see. Because, you know trends, trends drive popularity and education drives those trends.
Catherine: Do you think that we are starting to see that on the consumer side?
Michal: Absolutely, some of the products we make here do go into the retail space, and customers are really starting to pay attention to packaging in the consumer space. And so with that, I think that is, that's the start of that transition to really understanding not just the impact of the packaging that you throw away when you're using the product, but then beyond that, but the product itself has an impact as well.
And so I think [with] customers that will be a natural transition to understand, to start to care more about the product itself and not just the packaging.
So absolutely, I think the consumer market and therefore, kind of the residential market of the built environment is going to head that way.
Catherine: Yeah, it certainly seems so from what we've been seeing as well. We were also talking about carbon emissions. Can you talk a little bit more about the work you're doing there? What are some examples of the work that you're doing currently to reach some of DuPont’s sustainability goals?
Michal: Well, one of my favorite parts about my job is being able to use the skills I have in understanding, you know, how life cycle assessment is done, and more importantly, to actually do it in the software systems. So it’s put me in a really fun position to not only do work on cool science in the lab, but I get to partner with different project team leaders within our innovation space to kind of look at the solutions that they're working on, whether it's a reformulation of an existing product or a brand new product that they think might be valuable to the market and start to do some initial modeling of what is going to be the carbon footprint.
And then, the most impactful part is to look at where it's at, kind of get on the scale, see how much it weighs, and then start looking at what are the hot spots, where are opportunities to make this a lower carbon product? You have to have the right tool to be able to do that, and ask those questions. And that makes innovation not just scientifically interesting, but with a purpose towards, you know, our planet, and of course, our business’s sustainability goals as well. It's a lot of fun. And, you know, it's still rooted in science and numbers and calculations, but with an even bigger purpose than just good innovation.
Catherine: So, those are some of the things that you're currently doing. If you had to give any advice or just tips, what are some things that building product manufacturers or others in the housing industry as well could be doing to lower their impact?
Michal: So, what we're seeing is that this is a fact kind of known. If you look at a product that you're trying to make the majority of the impact to the environment, especially in terms of global warming potential, typically comes from the scope three. That's the stuff kind of outside of your direct control. You can control the electricity usage of your manufacturing process. You can make your process more efficient, but sourcing raw materials that have a lower carbon footprint coming in with them, and then designing for the end of life of your product, that's that's where the hard work really lies.
So, what I'm seeing, and what we're learning internally, and my advice to any product manufacturer is good, open relationships with your raw material suppliers is going to be an absolute game changer, and that is necessary in order to really drive your products anywhere near net zero.
That's what we're seeing with our products, is that we've kind of done the work in our own backyard, and now we really have to engage with our raw material suppliers and drive them towards lowering their carbon footprint, because their wins become our wins as we purchase their materials to go into our products.
So, partnership, open dialog, common goals, that's going to be the key to being successful in this space.
Catherine: Their wins become our wins. I love that. Is there anything else that you would like to add, anything that you want people to take away from this conversation?
Michal: I think that when people think about a big company like DuPont, they don't often realize that there's just regular people like me that are doing the work.
The products that you see on a truck or at a jobsite or even on a shelf at a big box store, you know, there's people behind those products—not just me, but people I work with, and we are all really driven to make a difference in terms of keeping our global warming down to that 1.5, like we're driven by that. It's in our DNA.
And so, as we go on that journey, I just want people to feel good that there's a lot of really smart, hard working people with that common goal of working behind the scenes, and I'm one of them.
Catherine: Thank you so much.
Michal: Oh, you're so welcome. Really fun to talk to you, and I appreciate the time.
Thanks for listening to Women at WIRC. This podcast is a spinoff of our annual Women in Residential Construction Conference, which we’ve hosted since 2016. You can learn more about the conference and see when we’ll be in your area by visiting womensconstructionconference.com. Women at Work is a production of Endeavor Business Media, a division of Endeavor B2B. Until next time, keep up the good work.
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