Global experience.
Regional perspective.
Local impact.
Each year, we track several indicators that show progress toward our goals for socially responsible and sustainable projects.
Engineering News-Record’s annual Top 100 Green Buildings Design Firms ranking is based on the year’s design or construction revenue from projects that are green-building registered or certified by an independent rating organization (such as GBCI/LEED). For the past five years, we’ve ranked among the top 20 firms.
Our number of sustainability consulting projects represents the quantity of projects for which we provided sustainability services like energy modeling, developing net-zero strategies, and consulting related to green building certifications. Each year’s value is cumulative and represents all completed projects up to that date since we began reporting this indicator in 2018. Thornton Tomasetti launched our Sustainability practice in 2012.
The carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) reduction metric tracks the impact of energy-efficiency improvements from our sustainability consulting services. Each value is the sum of savings derived from energy modeling projects completed that year. We’ve increased our emissions savings significantly, due to a rise in the number and size of projects, along with increasingly stringent energy-reduction goals.
Average per-project cost savings are derived from the average energy cost savings from our sustainability consulting projects each year. Completion of many larger-scale projects has contributed to a growth in total savings.
Our R&D spending includes staffing and other support for CORE studio, our virtual idea incubator, as well as to semiannual innovation tournaments that identify ideas from employees across the firm. We continue to prioritize research and development in pursuit of our big goal: to be the global driver of change and innovation in our industry.
We ascertain the quantity of embodied carbon from our structural designs by calculating the global warming potential of the structural framing materials used in our major projects. Until 2019, we measured embodied carbon as part of an R&D project, the Thornton Tomasetti Embodied Carbon Lab. In 2020, we joined the Structural Engineers 2050 Commitment (SE 2050) and paused our annual embodied-carbon count to adjust to SE 2050’s reporting methodology. We reported on 30 projects in 2022 and are among the signatories with the most reported projects.
