Our industry is one of the largest and most important in the world, touching everyone’s life both professionally and personally. Yet in some vital respects, construction has been the most resistant to adaptation, especially technological advancement. Our dinners are delivered directly to our doors via an app, but our construction processes often remain stuck in legacy approaches that impact costs, efficiencies, affordability, and, even, climate.
But there’s reason to believe this is about to change, especially with respect to climate impact.
Oslo, Norway’s largest city and its capital, has recently announced that it wants all municipal construction sites to be zero emission by 2025. By 2030, all construction work, public or private, has to follow suit. The city is using purchasing power as leverage, awarding contracts to suppliers with, among other things, zero emission machinery. Oslo’s lead is being followed by Copenhagen and Helsinki despite the high cost of electric machinery over diesel. Electric machinery has more advantages over conventional machinery than just ticking a procurement box. Quieter machines can often mean longer hours worked.
Digitisation of construction sites is delivering benefits as well. As Andrew Young, associate director of innovation at the Sino Group told the BBC:
“Knowing what’s going on at a construction site, capturing data, and digitising the process is a big thing for the whole industry. Any improvement in construction site process means big, big dollars. If you can save one, two, or three days and speed things up it’s already big savings.”
And speeding up construction means reduced climate impact.
But maximising climate impact in construction goes well beyond electric machinery or even building sites.
What we are seeing both in our own research in advanced manufacturing and through listening to our community of engineers and builders is that climate impact innovation in construction will likely be delivered both top down and bottom up. In other words, regulatory settings will continue to serve as a ‘stick’ in driving climate behavioural change, but possibly just as important, will be the ‘carrot’ of economic and competitive benefits driving new technological innovations.
For example, using advanced manufacturing learnings to re-think how a building is constructed and what materials are needed to construct it will drive savings in resources and acceleration in build time. Such an innovation will be embraced by those looking for cost-savings and peace-of-mind assurances as to the integrity of the solution, but the consequence of adoption will also have a powerful climate impact as resources both steel and energy are saved through lighter, faster construction.
Or imagine the effect of a virtual pre-construction technology that can visualise and price climate impact in real time into designs for builder and consumer that can even be tied into the lifecycle of the construction. By instantly delivering this kind of granular information, you unlock market incentives (e.g., a consumer can see that a certain positive choice for climate (windows) pays for itself in energy savings). Moreover, this kind of technology has already been shown to deliver cost savings in the pre-construction phase which supports spending toward driving better climate gains.
Ultimately, we are on a path not only to zero-emission construction sites but to a much greener world, a goal that will most likely be achieved by many independent construction technologies and new processes all coming together to deliver out-sized climate impact.
Donovan Group has been solving entrenched construction challenges since the 1960s. Explore their tech platforms, AirBuildr and utecture, and flagship building products, DonoBeam and DonoBrace, at https://donovangroup.com/