Careers with the Athena Institute
From its Canadian Headquarters (Ottawa, On, Canada), and through its US affiliate, Athena Institute International, the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute works to further the cause of sustainability of the built environment through the following three-pronged approach:
- design and manage research projects to develop consistent, reliable environmental life cycle inventory data for a full range of building and infrastructure product groups, which means working with most major industrial sectors;
- develop, adapt and apply tools to improve environmental assessment capabilities for building products, whole buildings and selected infrastructure; and
- advance the practice and application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to the built environment through contract research and a variety of international collaborative activities and educational outreach programs.
Over the past decade, the Institute has developed a worldwide reputation in the field of sustainable building and LCA. The Institute shares its knowledge and expertise through worldclass LCA databases, groundbreaking software, and customized consulting services.
The Institute’s proprietary software, the Impact Estimator (IE), is North America’s only whole building life cycle assessment software. The IE is capable of simulating over 1,200 different assembly combinations, or about 95% of the building stock, on a regional North American basis. It puts the environment on an equal footing with other more traditional design criteria at the conceptual design stage of a building project.