The Need to Reduce the Carbon Footprint of Construction Projects

In 2018, the buildings and construction industry consumed a staggering 36% of the world’s total energy and contributed 39% of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. These figures highlight the urgent need for transformative action within the construction sector. (Neuroproject, 2024)

In fact, as businesses face the challenge of reducing their carbon footprint, there is an increasing need for easy-to-use and more accessible carbon calculator tools. The current way of performing carbon calculations is not only time-consuming and effortful, but it also requires the use of different tools and manual reporting, making the entire process daunting for business owners.

The above explains why Eirik and Herman spent the past two years developing a team to build Reduzer, a carbon-free construction tool enabling business owners and developers to collaboratively manage their company’s carbon footprint using environmental data and insights.

Today, 50 companies - including consulting experts, builders, architects, and building owners - are using Reduzer to achieve more seamless carbon calculations. By involving key stakeholders early on in the project lifecycle, business leaders can access and evaluate their environmental project data to optimise their design and construction solutions.

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Using Speckle to Make Carbon Calculations Accessible

Speckle acted as a reliable infrastructure for the Reduzer team to shape their product. Being an open-source package, Speckle provided a pool of BIM software, connectors, and apps with which Reduzer could integrate directly, allowing for seamless data extractions. In addition, Speckle’s viewer served as a collaborative and engaging interface that Reduzer could leverage for data visualisation. Thanks to Speckle’s viewer, Reducer offers model data checks, quality assurance opportunities, material quantity estimations and carbon calculations.

“Smart people already put in the effort to build a BIM interpreter and connector so we did not have to build it from scratch. We had a chance to focus on other things.” - says Eirik, CEO and CTO at Reduzer.

Check out this video for a quick demo.

Reduzer’s Impact So Far

Overall, customers use Reduzer to make decisions from the earliest design phases (e.g. proposals for architectural contractor competitions), and later on to make strategic decisions (what materials to use as the building is being built). Others connect their standardised BIM models with Reduzer to achieve calculations, reducing the time of manual effort by up to 12 hours.

Herman and Eirik shared a recent customer story with us. One of the biggest builders in Norway, Veidekke, used Reduzer when bidding for a new office building in competition with other builders. They created a BIM model of their suggested solution and used it for cost estimation and carbon calculations. For the carbon calculations, they used the Speckle integration in Reduzer.

"The fact that we can get the quantities directly into Reduzer via Speckle is a huge advantage and saves us a lot of work." - Hans Galåen, Project developer, Veidekke

"I'm happy with how it worked. Since the architects' BIM models are usually very incomplete in an offer phase, it is important for us to have a tool like this where we can calculate carbon emissions directly from the quantity models we create ourselves." - Bjørnar Haveland, Head of the department, Veidekke Førde.

The Future of Reduzer

Reduzer is looking to open up to EU-based countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, where companies are already testing the product. The team has also received interest from Germany,  Poland, Austria, and Portugal. With their mission of making carbon calculations accessible at scale, Reduzer believes that Speckle will help them scale up faster. The team aims to integrate closer with Speckle in the long term, leveraging it as a core solution for their platform and ultimately making carbon calculations available for the AEC industry in Europe.

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