Reconstruct your idea of sustainability | Peter Rupp | TEDxHSGSalon
[Applause] foreign so it's really a true pleasure and honor to be back to my alma mater after exactly 30 years and it's a true pleasure to talk about my two big Passions about digitalization and sustainability over my 30 years now working in different functions in construction industry I learned about two key facts in this wonderful industry the first one construction industry consumes around 50 percent five zero of the materials which are explored day by day from this planet and by that contribute according to the International Energy agency around 40 percent to the carbon footprint which are human made again on this planet and the second fact about construction industry is that it has hardly been any productivity gain over the last decades not even centuries so the productivity curve in construction industry is basically flat and you probably agree with me that this gives tremendous opportunities and potential to improve both productivity but also sustainability and that's actually I like to talk about what are in particular these challenges but even more importantly how digital means will help and can help to overcome these challenges and address the potential so let me look now into the challenges on sustainability in particular and you saw already before this nice picture nothing to do with construction industry maybe these are some Clauses in some areas to work on construction site but my question is here which of the two shirts the the red one or the blue one is more sustainable and probably I tried to to guess no one here in this room and probably no one at all can objectively state which of the two closest has the higher or the better sustainability performance and if you go now one level deeper go to the construction industry start with a simple two simple tools also here which one the orange or the blue one is more sustainable and again it's probably not possible to answer that objective despite the fact that millions of data sustainability non-financial data meanwhile are collect it in the company I work for where I have more than 300 million data points just for non-financial data but I can tell you despite the inflation of green labels we see all around many companies are really Innovative to create new green labels it's not objectively possible to assess the performance today in the opposite with this increasing number of label green labels the mistrust into the True Performance of a product or even a company is even increasing so the question now is how to overcome this mistrust which for sure is existing right now and here I like to go through four steps which I believe are essential to build up trust again to measure the True Performance sustainable performance of a product or even in the end of a whole building let me start with the first step and again it's crucial that we know and Define properly what is sustainability that we Define the key performance indicators which make sustainability and that might vary Company by company might vary industry by industry but for sure the product carbon footprint is one key performance indicator if you look deeper maybe it's also interesting to know what's the Recycled content in this product or maybe even the composition of materials the so-called bill of substance what type of materials are in this product what's the weight what's your reaching versus material was coming from and that needs to be defined so that's step number one step number two and that's actually the most most important one is to define a method an internationally accepted method how to measure this key performance indicators and again to stay with the most obvious one the product carbon footprint so in essence the emissions cost the CO2 missions cost over the complete life cycle of this product that needs to be defined and if you ask today six experts presumably experts probably are experts please calculate the Comfort print of C's power tool here I can guarantee you you will get six quite different answers a quite Big Range so a method a commonly defined method needs to be defined it doesn't sound rocket science but today that's not the case and then the third step is we need to Define targets smart targets as we call it to address and let's take again the carbon footprint smart means specific measurable it should be ambitious relevant and time-bounded and I think all is possible for a product calm footprint what's the carbon footprint today what's the goal for the next let's say five years and then you measure it year by year and that leads me to the first to do the fourth step we make have to make it transparent and here again if we look to corporations if we look to all kind of sustainability reports which are around also here companies try to change the method the tables dashboards year by year for whatever reason but that is not the right transparency so it's important to be transparent what was the base where are we on the progress towards the target so that's step number four so again let's summarize these four steps first Define the kpis and again that might be might vary industry by industry but what are the sustainability key performance indicators Define the method how to calculate that cert set targets smart targets and force be transparent consistent in your communication and transparency so now let's go deeper now and see how digitalization can support these four steps in particular step number four on the transparency and now imagine that you take your smartphone and you have this product and there is a QR code and you just scan this QR code and then the so-called digital product passport is popping up it's nothing else then the Digital Data for this particular product consisting of all kind of technical data so what's the performance what's the weight what's the reach the duration the the power whatever technical data might be applicable in this case for this power tool but it goes beyond that it includes also the instruction for use so this is an instruction for use simple one to charge a battery for such a power tool it's about 400 pages in 20 languages no visualization or limited one obviously no video material imagine you have a digital passport you get it in your language you get the supporting video material it's always up to date wonderful to have that and the digital passport should also include all kind of sustainability data or precisely the defined key performance indicators like the carbon footprint like the Recycled content like the bill of substance which makes this product how easy could it be so that's the digital passport and now go a little bit beyond the product go into this building this building consists of thousands of different products with a high repetition I mean these chairs you're sitting on it's all the same but you can have a digital passport for these chairs you can have a digital passport for the ceiling all the material and that sums up to the carbon footprint to the sustainability footprint of this building how wonderful would it be and you might have heard about the Bim Bim stands for building information modeling it's nothing else than the digital twin of a physical building and if we integrate now this digital passport into this big model we have over the complete life cycle of the building from the design phase operation end of life we have to con continuous overview about that sustainability dashboard of this building so it makes it really really beneficial so overall what are the benefits if we apply now these four steps and the more digitalization in construction industry so number one it's very obvious if I have this digital passport I can easily compare these two products along the defined key performance indicators I know based on the standardized method what is the Comfort print and I have the whole origin I can trace it back to the region and hopefully these are audited third party proofed data along this method so I have the possibility to compare second and that's why I brought this nice booklet these will be replaced by Digital Data so no need to print thousands of tons and I can tell you in our company we print thousands of tons of these booklets instruction of use year by year it will be completely replaced huge benefit to the environment and third if there's any change on the product sometimes we discover a mistake something needs to be adopted you don't need to reprint it you simply adjust it digitally and the user has the latest update if we go now into the building again the composition of thousands of products the benefit is even bigger I can compare during the design phase at the very very early stage different design alternatives for the building replace concrete with wood or other material and immediately see before the building is constructed the carbon footprint the recycle content the recyclability of a particular asset or building tremendous benefit at an early stage during operation I have always the overview what's the sustainability performance of this particular building like for instance the energy usage per square meter I can monitor that I can improve that I see leakages I can immediately adjust it and then most importantly end of life I know exactly which type of materials are in this building I can detect it I can make sure that the max is reused on my comp product level or if not possible on material Level and move it in proper recycling loops so tremendous advantages which are just laying there and it's all about to take them and make it happen So In Sum I hope you share my convention that digitalization truly reconstruct construction industry and by that have a tremendous impact on our planet thank you very much