Okay, not something you hear about every day. In fact, it’s something you have probably never heard about before.
When people talk about embodied energy (although it’s not the sort of thing that many people talk about!) they are basically referring to the amount of energy ‘locked up’ in the material in question. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘commercial energy’ – in other words the total sum of energy put into the manufacturing of any given product during its entire lifetime.