Podcast - Construction a sustainable future

Businesses in the construction industry are building and renovating more and more sustainably to deal with the climate crisis and scarcity of natural resources. These new construction methods have a whole new lexicon, a vocabulary of innovation and some solutions that this podcast is going to decipher for you!

Modern human activities are partly responsible for rising temperatures, various forms of pollution and declining biodiversity. This conjuncture has even created a new geological era: the Anthropocene. But what exactly does this concept mean? And how does it impact on the way we think about building a more sustainable world?

Xeriscaping is an approach to landscaping a yard that requires almost no watering, thanks to the right choice of plants and layout. This concept is gaining attention, particularly in urban planning, since water is becoming a rare resource that must be preserved. In this episode, we’ll discover what this unusual word really means.

The construction industry should aim for carbon neutrality by 2050. To reach that goal, we need to reduce what's called « embodied carbon emissions, » which are related to the manufacture, transportation and maintenance of a building and its materials. This episode goes more deeply into the meaning of embodied emissions and presents solutions allowing buildings to be more environmentally-friendly in terms of CO2.

Within twenty years, two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. Metropolises worldwide continue to grow along with all the challenges they face including fresh and waste management, atmospheric pollution, unaffordable housing... Cities need imperatively to adopt new construction methods to deal with growing urbanization.

Construction professionals need to change the way they build to limit the environmental footprint of their activities. How can they do this? By expanding their range of solutions to include bio-based materials. But what exactly does the term mean?

Why produce just one type of energy when you can produce two? This is precisely the function of cogeneration, a process various industries are harnessing to optimize their energy production and consumption. It’s a really promising solution for homes.

To meet construction needs while respecting environmental, economic and social issues, lightweight construction is emerging as a solution for the future. Much more than the use of lightweight materials, it is above all a new way of thinking about the building throughout its life cycle that is at stake.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back after a shock or difficult ordeal, before returning to the initial situation. In the building and construction sector, this notion is being used more and more frequently, particularly to anticipate and cope with extreme weather events linked to climate change.

No, this isn't a sci-fi scenario. Digital twins are real, and even useful in the construction sector, especially for building simulations. The aim? To save time and, above all, make buildings more efficient and sustainable!

“Clinkerization” is the technical term for the process of producing the backbone of cement: clinker. To produce clinker, non-renewable materials are heated to very high temperatures. One of the ingredients is limestone which releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide when heated. Consequently, the process has a big environmental footprint. Revolutionizing cement production has become a burning issue for the whole construction sector.

There's no doubt about it: cities are highly mineralized, and therefore sparsely planted. The consequence? They absorb more heat than the surrounding countryside, creating “urban heat islands”. But there are ways to avoid them, and make our cities more pleasant to live in when temperatures rise. Here are some examples in this latest episode.

A modular building is a structure designed to adapt to different uses after construction. Whether this involves using easy-to-assemble prefabricated modules or movable internal walls, the principle is the same: the flexibility to change the distribution of space in a building over time. This achieves a more agile, more practical and, most importantly, more sustainable building.

Building Operating Systems (BOS) are truly intelligent systems, guaranteeing the comfort of building occupants and providing invaluable support for proper maintenance. They are also important allies in reducing energy consumption in buildings. So, how do they work, where are they installed, and what is their development potential?

If you don’t know the acronym PAAS, it stands for “product as a service”. It’s a model based on how a product is used and not just its physical ownership. For businesses, this calls for new business models and longer-term thinking. And the world of construction is gradually starting to adopt a similar approach!

The concept of passive building emerged in Germany in the 1970s. The aim of this approach? To see how much could be done to reduce the energy bills of buildings. How these pioneering constructions and the related concepts have inspired architects and occupants to find ways to make homes more sustainable?

Faced with ever scarcer natural resources and the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the construction industry is looking to urban mining – the recovery of construction materials from demolished buildings. However, what may sound like a virtuous circle is beset with obstacles.

The construction industry consumes an enormous amount of raw materials. Resources that are running out, and whose extraction and use weigh heavily in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. What about the development of secondary raw materials?

A bill of materials, or BOM for short, is a list of all the materials needed to produce an end product – which includes buildings! It’s a tool that can prove especially useful for calculating a more accurate ecological footprint of buildings – and shrinking as much as possible.

Building Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, quantifies a building's environmental footprint over its entire life cycle. From the extraction of raw materials used in the manufacture of products and materials, through the operating phase to the end of the building's life. An invaluable tool to guide players in the sustainable construction sector!