The Construction Industry Needs A Sustainable Change
The construction industry accounts for approximately 40 percent of the total CO2 emissions globally and therefore has a huge potential to save the planet. More alarming statistics include:
- The world's oceans absorb 90 percent of the heat that we produce. This causes temperature increases to such an extent that ecosystems collapse.
- 1.2 trillion tons of the globe's ice masses melt annually. When the permafrost dries, methane is released, further increasing global warming.
- The CO2 level has never been higher during the last 2 million years than it is today.
Now more than ever, the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry is looking for sustainable ways to overcome these environmental challenges. The climate requires action which the construction industry is able and willing to deliver. Here’s how Gaiup built a Real-Time LCA platform leveraging Speckle to empower real-estate owners and developers, entrepreneurs, engineers, builders, and architects to design and deliver more sustainable, highly automated and efficient building projects.
Using Speckle To Make Climate Impact Everyobody’s Business
The AEC industry is fragmented and dominated by large vendor monopolies, leaving key stakeholders locked out of the value of the data they produce. Therefore, proprietary file formats and closed vendor cloud platforms leave us with no simple way to access building object-level data for analysis.
Gaiup chose Speckle as the technology solution for making smart and reliable data insights accessible to its users from within their own authoring tools. No need for time-consuming file exports, no need for files at all! On a mission to democratise 3D data for all, Speckle’s purpose perfectly aligns with Gaiup’s mission to democratise climate impact insights for the entire value chain involved in built environments.
Speckle has already been used in different ways to enable collaboration and data visualisation in the AEC world. In fact, Speckle serves as the uniquely open-source solution for 3D data collaboration, connectivity, and automation. With developer-friendly APIs and SDKs, teams can create apps and workflows to deliver value at scale. Speckle’s server can be hosted on any cloud provider (such as Microsoft Azure, GCP, AWS) and even on-premise, ensuring maximal impact while giving you complete ownership and control of your data. This is how Speckle enabled the Gaiup team to easily extract data from their users’ Revit models to their own server, saving them years of development work (literally!).
Gaiup has built a platform on top of the Speckle database that offers a dynamic and proactive view of emission insights and data across the board. In addition, using Speckle’s 3D Viewer allowed for high-quality and user-friendly visualisation and analysis, directly accessible from Gaiup’s web application, automatically synced with the underlying data.
By building apps as Gaiup has done, construction leaders, designers, real-estate owners, and architects alike can make proactive decisions based on reliable and actionable data. Not only that but Gaiup is poised to exploit data from any of the other BIM software (such as ArchiCad) that Speckle integrates with, not to mention the continuous improvement of the model viewer.
“Pressing send in the Speckle plug-in would automatically update everything inside the platform. This allows our end users to get a real-time view of the building’s climate impact,” says Martin, CTO of Gaiup.
Driving Sustainable Change In The AEC Industry
Real-Time LCA delivers a sophisticated and seamless solution that automatically gives teams access to comprehensive insights into a project's climate impact, including CO2e. Its environmental database allows access to thousands of building materials and full traceability to the sources. Gaiup’s platform not only automates 70-80% of LCA calculations, it also proactively offers material recommendations that lower the negative impact. Supported by an embedded digital assistant based on ChatGPT-4.0, LC Ada, even more professionals in AEC can act on the sustainable change needed.
So far, Gaiup has already shown an impact on projects in the construction industry, mainly improving transparency and collaboration across various stakeholders:
- Sustainability professionals experience an average decrease of 70-80% in their efforts in LCA processes
- Decision makers herald un-heard of accessibility and insights, making sustainability choices more informed
- Improved 3D models overall, as transparency is created early when these models are leveraged to map with environmental data for real-time insights.
“Fundamentally we believe with data and tech we can provide new capabilities to the professionals in the frontline of sustainable construction,” says Nabil, CEO of Gaiup.
With platforms like Gaiup’s Real-Time LCA, the AEC industry is heading toward a more sustainable future where everybody can contribute to its improvement. Join us to help the construction industry deliver more sustainable buildings today!
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