By Leise Sandeman – Co-Founder, Pathways
A sustainability manager at a mid-sized manufacturer recently told me something shocking: her team spends 80% of their time collecting and processing data. Only 20% is left for actually implementing improvements.
This isn’t just one company’s challenge. It’s an industry-wide problem that’s holding back our climate progress.
The scale of our challenge demands new solutions
The built environment accounts for approximately 37% of global CO2 emissions, according to the UN Environment Programme’s 2022 Global Status Report. Over the next three decades, we’re projected to construct more buildings than in all of human history (Architecture 2030).
This unprecedented scale of construction brings unprecedented responsibility.
To put this growth in perspective: the UN Environment Programme projects we’ll construct 230 billion square meters of new buildings by 2060 – equivalent to adding a new New York City to the world every month for the next four decades.
But our current approach to measuring and reporting environmental impact relies heavily on manual processes, spreadsheets, and time-intensive data collection. These methods simply won’t scale to meet our urgent climate challenges.
The gap between our ambitions and our tools grows wider every day.
The hidden cost of manual data collection
When sustainability professionals are burdened with seemingly endless data collection, they can’t focus on what matters most: implementing actual improvements to environmental performance.
This creates a painful irony: the frameworks we’ve created to help reduce emissions – Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) – are sometimes roadblocks themselves, consuming the very resources needed to implement meaningful change.
What’s equally concerning is that this data, when finally collected, is often already outdated. By the time companies complete their environmental assessments, the underlying data might already be years old.
The impacts are far-reaching: slow feedback loops in evaluating decarbonization strategies, delayed implementation of environmental initiatives, valuable expertise diverted to paperwork, and slower innovation due to the ambiguity of the current state.
Why traditional methods won’t scale
The regulatory landscape is rapidly evolving. The 2017 Buy Clean California Act, for example, requires contractors to submit facility-specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for four key materials: carbon steel rebar, structural steel, flat glass, and mineral wool board insulation.
The act represents a significant shift in how we regulate environmental impacts in construction, and the manual approaches that worked for early adopters of environmental reporting simply cannot scale to meet the growing demand.
Consider the complexity facing the construction industry: every commercial building requires hundreds of different materials and products, from structural beams and columns to architectural facades and finishes. Each material has its own environmental impact data, supplier information, and reporting requirements. Each supplier has their own systems and formats for data. And each jurisdiction has its own reporting standards. Managing environmental data across this complex supply chain with manual methods is becoming increasingly untenable.
A call to action for our industry
The solution isn’t to abandon environmental reporting – it’s to revolutionize how we collect and process this crucial data. And innovation is already reshaping the landscape of data in sustainable manufacturing.
Tools like Tangible, Cove.tool, C.Scale, and Pathways are deploying advanced automation and integrated modeling to empower not only dedicated sustainability professionals, but all manufacturers, architects, engineers, and developers, to evaluate, analyze, and act on environmental data at a scale previously unattainable.
These innovations point to a future where the industry’s focus shifts from counting emissions to cutting them.
It’s not easy, and it often requires new collaborations – when we work with our customers, their IT and procurement teams are always an integral part of the journey. But a willingness to embrace new technologies and rethink traditional workflows will accelerate our industry’s ability to achieve our climate ambitions.
I think back to that sustainability manager spending 80% of their time collecting and processing data, and our goal is to flip the script, so those leaders and their teams are spending at least 80% of their time on sustainability improvement and driving meaningful climate change.
This guest post was written by Leise Sandeman, co-founder and co-CEO of Pathways, for the Carbon Leadership Forum. The views expressed here represent her experience working with manufacturers and sustainability professionals across the construction industry.
This guest post was written by Leise Sandeman, co-founder and co-CEO of Pathways, for the Carbon Leadership Forum. The views expressed here represent her experience working with manufacturers and sustainability professionals across the construction industry.
