Sustainable Building Monthly! What is the The Pacific Coast Collaborative ?

Sustainable Building Week networking is too much fun to keep it once a year. We’ll supply the drinks, light snacks, and a few topics of discussion.

Curious how built environment policy gets developed in the Pacific Northwest region?

The Pacific Coast Collaborative is an association of Pacific Coast cities, states, and provinces joined together to mitigate climate change through innovative policies and planning across several initiatives. At the COP26 meeting in Glasgow in late 2021, PCC leaders announced the launch of the Low-Carbon Construction Task Force, a regional initiative to advance low-carbon materials and methods in building and construction projects. This initiative has been working to develop a shared regional strategy to accelerate innovation, investment, and market development for low-carbon materials by leveraging the scale of the Pacific Coast regional economy. Join us for an overview of the initiative, our recently completed action plan, what steps you can expect to see partner jurisdictions take regionally in the coming years, and to discuss opportunities to engage.

Our presenters are task force members Amanda Ingmire, Senior Policy Analyst, Oregon DEQ Built Environment Program, and Lauren Zimmermann, Embodied Carbon Analyst, City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

Lauren Zimmermann is a member of the Climate team within the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability at City of Portland. In her role, she conducts research and collaborates with other bureaus, cities, regional councils, and coalitions to develop policy recommendations that will reduce the embodied carbon of building materials, construction practices, and waste management in Portland. She grew passionate about bio-based and re-used materials while learning to build strawbale passive house in Moab, Utah in 2012. After 3 years of building houses and 8 years in design practice management at an architecture firm, she is enthusiastic about tackling the sustainable materials problem from the policy side. Policy change can be slow, but it is meaningful to impact the life cycle of materials since the built environment is a project that outlives any one group of people.

Amanda Ingmire is a Licensed Architect and Senior Policy Analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) with 15 years of experience working in the built environment. Amanda’s work at DEQ is focused on addressing the full life cycle impacts of the built environment while centering equity, racial justice, and wellbeing. As a co-lead of DEQ’s Built Environment program, she conducts research, develops projects and programs, consults on state building projects, serves as an advisor and provides expert testimony to numerous boards, commissions, businesses, and government entities, and collaborates with many partners to advance a holistic, systems approach to addressing some of our biggest challenges.

Come down and have some fun!

All sustainability friends are invited whether you’re in design, construction, academia, government, business, manufacturing, or something else. All are welcome because it will take all of us to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Masks are not required in the well-ventilated, often open air “decony”.