According to the World Green Building Council, more than 11% of global carbon emissions are caused by constructing buildings. A further 28% of emissions comes from those structures’ ongoing use and management.
It’s no surprise then that organisations worldwide are being asked to manage and reduce their operational carbon emissions and the embodied carbon of their developments.
Beyond societal pressure, many of our clients also have to comply with government mandates that require them to implement practices or processes that reduce their projects’ carbon footprint. Larger organisations are expected to take steps to measure their carbon emissions, or at least within their strategic direction, formulating a statement such as carbon neutral.
The European market faces even more rigour around building permits and approvals as life cycle assessments become mandated. We might expect to see similar expectations in the APAC region, too.
For smaller contractors, there's a commercial necessity for sustainability. When responding to tenders, they are expected to provide methodologies detailing how they will minimise on-site waste and mitigate impacts on surrounding neighbourhoods, among other considerations.
It is also becoming a point of difference for contractors to stand out from the rest. For example, improvements in product or manufacturing processes that reduce steel or concrete can offer a leading edge when being considered by principal contractors.
Manufacturers see this as a positive for the environment and a selling point. Companies are trying to create products with less raw material, often including recycled materials, to deliver solutions with lower embodied carbon.
Meeting sustainability requirements is no simple feat. There are many factors that influence sustainability beyond simple materials selection–travel patterns, power consumption, and project timelines all have an impact on the carbon emissions associated with any given project.
In this complexity lies an opportunity–the virtualisation of processes. This involves the creation of detailed digitised environments that cover the entire design-build-manage lifecycle. These provide real-time, realistic, and accurate representations of complex projects, resulting in increased levels of communication, clarity, and engagement for all stakeholders.
If done well, project lifecycle data will be accurate and accessible for future needs and analysis. It will inevitably act as the new foundation for project-ready design delivery, reducing the need for traditional discovery and project-startup labour costs and effort.
By leveraging technology to simulate and analyse operations, we can achieve a previously inaccessible level of measurability. This approach enables organisations to gain insights into their environmental impact and identify areas for improvement.
When projects take years to complete end-to-end, and with zero opportunities for a do-over, how can we effectively measure and optimise carbon emissions for construction? This is where digitisation comes in.
Reducing waste is one straightforward route to reducing carbon emissions–use less concrete, for example, and you get a double benefit of lower construction costs and lower embodied carbon for your building. However, this methodology can be short sighted sometimes. What if we could predict and plan how we interact with our built world for years to come?
At DBM Vircon, we use the term SAIM, which stands for Serviced Asset Information Model. SAIM is the provision of services to curate a facilities asset information model that provides the SAIM representation of real-world assets. This includes creating and managing the model to maintain its currency and accuracy for the life of the asset.
This is a service that integrates project lifecycle data within the as-built 3D model, creating an information-rich asset that allows clients to understand their built environment through a whole new lens. It enables you to analyse, assess, and track your environments in more detail to update any operational changes and amendments to your facilities so you can keep track of your built environment data.
Understanding the built environment enables sustainable practices in a few ways:
For example, within vertical construction, services are quite often inaccessible – especially services that are inground. Understanding the condition or status of these services is also difficult to track, with SAIM, you can monitor and manage things like water usage, detect leaks, and optimise water distribution systems to reduce wastage.
At DBM Vircon, we advocate for the use of advanced technology to virtualise, plan, and validate construction methodologies.
Just one example of how this works is modelling the use of steel rebar for concrete reinforcement. Steel rebar is responsible for a significant amount of wastage and embodied carbon, so any reduction in wastage can lead to major savings.
The management and installation of rebar is often left to the supply chain. Steel is bent on site, leading to wastage. Anything not used on site goes to landfill, wasting resources, time, and labour, and of course leads to an increase in the embodied carbon on the project.
To mitigate this, we meticulously model and analyse rebar utilisation in a virtual environment, so steel can be bent offsite and delivered ready to install, minimising the majority of traditional factors when it comes to waste.
This doesn’t just save time and money in the installation of rebar – using these same 3D models, it’s possible to optimise the placement and configuration of concrete to make lighter and more energy-efficient structures. Structures that go through a virtualisation process are built to last, reducing the need for repairs and extending the life of the asset.
And because concrete and steel are standard materials with a known carbon footprint, it’s simple to measure how much carbon this activity saves, too.
Virtualisation doesn’t just stop with reducing material waste. 3D models can be generated to create immersive environments that can be used for a range of tasks after a building has been completed.
Consider the costs of flying new team members out to remote sites across Australia (or anywhere else in the world) for safety briefings or site inspections, or the costs involved in real-world inductions for tower crane operators. All of these could be achieved through virtual reality (VR) interactions within virtualised environments. VR can facilitate virtualized training and onboarding, too. The sustainability benefits here are multifaceted: this reduces emissions, reduces energy use, and has safety benefits.
Navigating these spaces in VR from the comfort of a head office, or even your own home, could represent a huge reduction in emissions you gain by cutting down on flights and other travel, not to mention the huge cost reduction for the businesses involved.
COVID-19 saw the transition from office-based working to home-based working. Society adapted quickly to virtualise how we interact with each other. The result is a significant decrease in our impact on the environment. Whether it's a scope 1, 2 or 3 emission type, virtualisation within all delivery and management processes will reduce emissions.
Virtual models also reduce mistakes – they provide the opportunity to plan, in detail, the movement of plant or large shipments through existing sites.
Using a virtualised environment based on BIM data and incorporating photogrammetric scans gathered from the site gives a richer context for models and movement, meaning these environments are more immersive than ever before.
The improvements of Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies can now support this integration allowing teams to plan, map and virtualise the outcome before it even happens. These allow the market to reduce errors and risk, reuse past data to make better decisions and recycle these practices for optimal delivery.
In fact, these models can provide even more information that wouldn’t be possible in the real world. In a single view, the real-world environment can be shown with bespoke overlays displaying live power lines, exclusion zones, or even progress reports for project completion.
These are just a couple of examples of how virtualised construction methodologies can help your business think differently about sustainability and carbon reduction, and what the returns on that investment could be. Many sustainability efforts come with associated benefits to the bottom line – they just shouldn’t always be the first consideration.
Virtualisation does require increased investment and effort up front in a project, and some of the benefits may not be fully realised for decades or even generations to come. But if we collectively reframe our thinking on what return on investment means in the context of sustainability, we can all work together towards a better future.
