What Goes Around Comes Around: There’s Value in Construction Circularity

In 2020, the global buildings and construction industry accounted for 37-39% of all CO₂ emissions and 36% of energy consumption (of these, actual construction work accounted for 10% and 6% of global emissions and energy totals, respectively). Much of this was caused by wastage through inefficient design, inefficient transportation, construction methods, and emissions from the decommissioning or decrepitude of older buildings. 

Circularity—the reuse and repurposing of building materials for brownfield as well as greenfield developments—may be a pivotal solution to reduce the construction industry’s carbon footprint. 

48% (or $31.3 billion) of all rework in the US is caused by poor communication and data: 22% caused by poor data and 26% by poor communication. This is with the average trust score being 4.1 (out of 5, where 5 is very high trust) in the US. It’s 3.9 in Singapore. And it’s estimated that construction waste will amount to 2.2 billion tons by 2025. 

In this way, poor communication and poor quality of information set up barriers for construction industry supply chain circularity. Improvements in information and digital technology would be able to help you help the environment. Data on building materials, element-wise data, and other intricate oversight would provide the rich databases required for circular economics to truly yield benefits for construction supply chains. 

What are the sources of this poverty of information? One of the key sources is a lack of centralised repositories of information regarding circular materials. Project and progress information originates from several nodes and stakeholders in ways that are not intuitive or manageable at scale. These include the site team, logistics, suppliers, and subcontractors. 

Having to centralise this information is a time- and labour-intensive process that is unavoidable. Firms often need to staff full-time personnel to chase stakeholders for relevant information.

Learn more about this with this free case study on how Lindner used Geometrid.

Beyond the obvious benefits in terms of sustainability and lowered non-essential demand for raw materials, there are also clearly demonstrated financial benefits of circularity, with McKinsey estimating that the economic advantage of adopting circular economic approaches to sourcing could amount to $3.7 trillion per annum. 

So information management with an eye on circularity is essential to achieve both sustainable practices and financial sustainability.  Geometrid can be used to centralise information from multiple sources to achieve a more robust internal tracking system. This is achieved by having all members of your project team as well as suppliers and subcontractors on the same platform, with all progress information automatically consolidated into a reportable format as soon as the information enters the system.

Check out how Next Level Group accomplished this with Geometrid in this free case study. 

Finally, it’s important for your circular technology to be circular itself. Investing in technology that helps you be more circular without being circular itself eventually becomes hypocritical. Working with technology with as little physical hardware as possible (having a bias towards cloud-based applications and solutions) and as much integration with currently owned hardware as possible (using smartphones or repurposing existing equipment instead of purchasing new proprietary hardware) can help you keep your tech waste to a minimum. 

Technological circularity can also be sought by focusing on technology with minimal training turnaround time. Time is money and time spent by your team to be trained (and then time spent on the learning curve after that) is time not spent on your projects and clients. Prefer intuitive and streamlined solutions where the time-to-impact is as low as possible. 

Geometrid doesn’t need warehouses of servers, clunky pieces of hardware, technically difficult installation, or other hassles that slow down the enjoyment of benefits from your investment in technology and increase resistance amongst your employees.

With its browser-based interface and (soon) API-first data pipelines, there’s a place for everyone and everyone is in their place: site teams and suppliers can simply scan QR codes or RFID tags with their smartphone to update element-wise data real-time; project managers can meanwhile view project-level aggregate data with an accessible 3D model representation of progress as it happens and can generate reports automatically with complete and accurate data at the click of a button; decision-makers can view portfolio-level data for multiple projects and oversee the business operations of their firm. 

And all of this with minimal training so that your team can remain task-focused. Learn more about how Geometrid can snap onto your firm seamlessly with this free datasheet.

Get your free whitepaper from Geometrid on what the German Supply Chain Act is, how it may impact your firm, and how you can be prepared!