Sustainable building data - 2050 Materials
Welcome to episode 61 of the green & healthy places podcast in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality.
Phanos Hadjikyriakou is co-founder and Ceo of 2050 materials, an online database of sustainable building products and intelligent tools that help architects and designers in their efforts to create low-carbon, circular buildings and interiors.
In this podcast we discuss the genesis of the company, the unmet need it addresses in real estate and the sustainability problems it tries to solve, such as toxic building materials and those that are especially damaging to the environment when viewed from a Life Cycle perspective, considering its extraction, use phase and disposal options at its end of life.
We also cover some of the many sustainable building material certification systems as well as how Artificial Intelligence could start to leverage this type of database to propose sustainable, healthy solutions to architects and designers in the not too distant future.
Check out 2050-materials.com while you’re listening along!
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS COURTESY OF OTTER.AI - EXCUSE TYPOS!
Matt Morley
First of all, thank you for making the time to join us today on the podcast. Pleasure to have you here.
Why don’t we talk about the genesis of the business? So how did 2050 materials start as an idea? And what’s that journey been like, from the initial concept through to where you’re at today?
Data on Real Estate Supply Chains
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, great. So I guess that goes back a little bit to my background. I’m an engineer by training. And I would say I’m pretty much a data person in my brain, I was working basically in the financial sector, helping investors align their portfolios with different climate strategies, and essentially giving them different kinds of data on climate change risk.
2025 Materials Principle
The whole idea behind 2050 Materials started when I was working with a few very large real estate investors who started talking about supply chains and supply chain emissions and embodied carbon in the portfolios and in the buildings they owned. I come from a family of architects and people working in materials distribution.
So that sparked my interest, what I figured out very quickly is that what investors were starting to ask for and talk about, everything related to supply chain and material impact, is something that the people on the ground, the designers, the contractors, the building materials suppliers, simply did not have the right data to deliver on sustainability performance.
So I thought that, first of all it’s a big problem, secondly, it’s a big opportunity to fill that gap with a solution. I generally have an affinity for innovation within the material sector. I just think it’s very cool when you see a new material that you can actually touch and feel. And there’s a story behind where it comes from and what it’s been made of. And also if you can add the impact data to it. And that, for me makes it very interesting.
Much More than a Sustainable Building Materials listing Site
Matt Morley
So let’s look at that. Because obviously, on one level, what you’ve developed is, if you like a database of materials, that for someone like me, who’s involved in real estate, primarily interiors, less the construction side, there’s a constant search for new innovative materials that not only look good and fit into a particular space that we’re trying to propose to a developer, but also that are doing some good or and certainly doing less harm to the environment.
Then there’s another level to all of this, from what I can see, it’s a bit more than just becoming an online collection of materials, right, there’s more depth to it that I think is really where it starts getting interesting. Can you talk to us about those calculations and about that extra level of detail that you’re able to get into around the body carbon and the impact of the materials? The platform provides simplified metrics to help designers quickly assess the impact of materials.
Moving to a Low Carbon Construction Industry
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Well, let’s start from the assumption that we need to transition to a low carbon economy and to Climate Neutral economy. And the construction sector, whether you’re an interior designer, or an architect, or just work in the built environment, the impact your work has is actually massive. And our thesis is that data is the key to getting to a stage where we are designing and eventually building buildings in line with the climate emergency.
Now, the interesting thing about this space is that there’s an abundance of data that shows impacts of specific products and materials in the sector. The problem is that that kind of data is all around the internet, usually in PDFs, and usually in a format that’s very technical. So it’s usually what’s called the lifecycle assessment or an environmental product declaration that states these kinds of values.
Unfortunately, the assessment and the output of these reports are meant to be read by a specialist in the sector. And what the reality is, you need designers and architects who are not specialists in the sectors to still be able to access and understand that data.
So something that’s often, let’s say, misconception of a lot of people when they land on our platform, is that we do a lot of assessment of existing product. In fact, all we do at this point is gather existing data from different sites, we digitize it so that it’s actually accessible on the platform. And you don’t have to look through 1000s of PDF files to extract the information you need.
And then finally, we, and probably most importantly, we actually simplified to the extent that it keeps its accuracy, but it’s actually understandable by a non specialists. So what that means is that we filter out the detail that is probably unnecessary to most designers and architects, so that we quickly give them the numbers they need in order to make an assessment. And we put that at the forefront of the platform, providing easy to consume data on the sustainability performance of building products.
3rd Party Certifications for Sustainable Materials
Matt Morley
Just as a note, I would say I’m totally on board with that approach. I think there’s absolutely no issues in relying on established third party certification systems, whether it’s an environmental product declaration, or a healthy product declaration, or something like that, declare a red list to the cradle the cradle, for example, those are the gold standards, and when you have a little bit of knowledge about this space, then I think you can leverage that, you’re standing on their shoulders.
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we always say is that we are trying to democratize these kinds of sustainability assessments, and that exactly pointing to the fact that yes, we do have Sustainability Consultants and specialists using the platform. But what we are building the platform for, or the person, or the stakeholder we’re building the platform for is actually the average designer, architect, contractor, who is having conversations with a customer or with a colleague around sustainability.
They need to start understanding this kind of data without going back to university and getting a degree in this. The platform is built for designers and architects to use data during the design and specification phases, simplifying metrics for easy understanding and use in this context.
The Evolution of Sustainability Data on Sustainable Building Materials
Matt Morley
It's interesting, if you tried to do this, five years ago, 10 years ago, you probably wouldn't have had quite so many materials, right? So it's a sign of where the industry is at now that you're able to have such a wide collection, I think it's, it's the right time, because it is now becoming the choices quite expensive. And it's becoming actually sometimes harder to filter through that. But why don't we take a step back?
I understand that perhaps not everyone may not understand the context, which is that there are unhealthy versions or unsustainable materials going into our built environment, both from the construction and then the interior fit out.
So from your perspective on the inside of this industry, like what are the main dangers there? And what are what are we? What are you battling against presenting these more sustainable healthy materials? And what's the problem here with the unhealthy buildings?
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
That's an interesting question. So I would say, let's look at human health. First, when it comes to coming into contact with harmful substances and pollutants, we actually come into contact with those in our daily lives more frequently than we realize. So that might be from building insulation that's, that's packed with flame retardants, to chemicals in our food packaging, in might be wet paint that's emitting VOCs, volatile organic compounds.
So all of these things actually contribute or can contribute negatively to human health and cause things like asthma and a bunch of other health issues. There's definitely there's definitely, let's say, a very imminent health issue that is fixed when you start looking at more sustainable products. But I would say that a big driver of health is also just global health and looking at climate climate issues.
I would say that, yes, in the short term, we want to avoid, for example, vocs emissions in our buildings, because we, we don't want to have respiratory diseases in the long term. And it's not even that long term. If we don't stop emitting as much carbon from the construction industry, then we all of our lives, I believe will be impacted from climate impact. I would split the two things into let's say, direct human health today and then long term health for us. For our kids for, for basically everyone who is living.
Matt Morley
Well “green and healthy places” is the name of the podcast. I think that connection between green as in good for the planet, and healthy, good for us, or in this case, good for the people spending time in a space, then the yin and the yang interact, I think is fundamental.
Do you think there's, is there an element of perhaps sustainability being more applicable to the building materials themselves? Just in terms of the quantities involved for concrete and steel, for example, versus say the interior fit out? Where perhaps it's more to do with health? Or is that is that dichotomy to generalist?
Environmental Impact of a Building Over its Whole Lifespan
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
I think traditionally, you know, I think concrete and steel is obviously the two materials that kind of get the spotlight, especially when we're talking about carbon emissions. And that's because the industry as a whole is producing a lot of carbon emissions. So if you look at a building, it's an interesting case study, actually, because if you look at the buildings materials, you would see that yes, most of the carbon emissions of a new building is in the foundation and the frame. So usually carbon, usually concrete, and steel and aluminium.
Unfortunately, if you actually look at a specific time span, let's say 50 years of a commercial building that hosts officers, say in central London, the reality is that the fit out the change of fitouts. And the frequency of change of fitouts, actually can cause up to four times the emissions of the of the envelope of the building.
So if you take, for example, an office in central London that has new desks, new chairs, new cabinets, new flooring every, let's say, two to six years, which is the average time of fatal change, then all of those emissions related to the products and the materials that go into the, the interiors are actually much larger than the building itself. And of course, all of this has, has a certain assumption. So if we were to reuse a lot of those products, then of course, we would reduce the impact.
But as it stands today, where most of those things are either thrown in the landfill, or let's say down cycled over big extent, fitouts are massively important. So I know it's not an extremely helpful answer, because it might, it would be nicer if we could focus on a couple of a couple of sectors.
But I think what this kind of research is starting to show is, truly, if you work in the built environment, whether you are doing fitouts, or interior design or residential project, or you're a structural engineer, or anything else, your work really matters, like it really matters to be able to have access to this kind of information and to do your part in reducing emissions.
Value and Purpose in Prioritizing Sustainable Building Materials
Matt Morley
I find at some point, it becomes more about your values, or the values of your business and what you're trying to do in your work that pushes one designer or someone working in this space to consider both equally. And sometimes there are decisions to be made. And you know, what materials are better for the planet and not quite so good for their human health or vice versa? It can often be quite complicated.
I think that's why platforms and software such as what you've developed is, is important so that at the next level of detail, then when we're actually on the website looking into some of these materials, doing our research, how are you helping users to kind of make some calculations beyond just Oh, that's a green certified material, but then in terms of its actual impact once it's applied, in terms of the quantities and the scale, and where it's coming from.
So in terms of those details, is there a way you're able to help your users to factor those into the into the equation?
Circular Economy Design Metrics in Building Materials
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, absolutely. And your question comes at a good timing, because we’ve launched the tool to do a lot of the things you just mentioned very recently, and users can trial it and try it out for free to start with, essentially what this tool allows you to do is get anything that you would find on the library and make a list of it.
And this can be done at any stage of the design process or it can be done really early stage where you’re not really thinking yet about designs and quantities and you just want to understand more or less what it means, what are the forecasted footprint of my building with me.
Once you have a bill of quantities and you really have a data list of everything you’re about to procure. What we are doing is we collect the data of the products that are on the library within this tool once you’ve selected it as a user.
We show, of course, the total carbon footprint, as well as some numbers, like the embodied carbon per meter squared of gross internal area and do some comparisons of that number to industry benchmark as well as some of the recommended numbers in the industry, we actually go a step beyond just focusing on carbon, we calculate currently a couple of circularity metrics, like the weight of the recycled content in the products that you’re selecting.
And the recyclable contents are kind of how much of the products and the materials that you’re specifying may actually be possible to recycle or reuse at the end of life. And I guess, one thing that that became important when we’re developing this tool, with a few large offices is we we initially were thinking that designers will use this tool solely based on actual products that are available in the market.
So meaning, you know, x brick by this kind of supplier or this kind of manufacturer, what we’ve developed now is we’ve developed an extra layer where it’s generic data for a specific type of product or type of material.
So something that says, for example, a clay brick from the UK without necessarily specifying who the manufacturer is. So that kind of gives a workflow that allows you to, if you’re starting by just considering materials in the beginning, you can choose your materials. And then once you get into the specification process, or if you want to see whether there is an applicable product in your area, to actually go into the product selection process during the specification phases.
Yeah, and one thing I did not mention, but you did actually in your question is, of course, the impacts that we show, you know, they show the manufacturing emissions of the product. So what’s in lifecycle assessment terms is called the A 123 lifecycle stages. But the interesting thing about setting a platform like the one we have is, we have the project location.
And we have the manufacturing location of each of those products in the library, which means that we can quite accurately calculate what the estimated carbon emissions are of transporting those materials.
So one of the things that you can do in the tool is you can pick a bunch of products from the, from the platform that are, let’s say, from China, or a London project, and you’ll see in the breakdown of emissions per category, that the transportation emissions exceed everything else, versus selecting local materials.
And I think there’s an interesting opportunity there to see, you know, what kind of products maybe does make sense to ship from a little bit further away, even though they might not be available locally versus other ones, which, of course, would outweigh the benefits.
Matt Morley
For anyone who’s done a project before with a sustainability or a healthy materials component to it. The reality is this type of detailed conversation, almost every material and it becomes a major headache pretty quickly, you’re constantly evaluating or trying to get to this type of information about not just where materials from how it was produced the impact of extracting it, and its raw format, then in terms of the manufacturing, production, then the transport, and its end of life, as well as it’s in use phase.
And combining all of that is really complicated, because it’s just, you’re trying to move fast, you’ve got climate pressure. And so I think for anyone who’s perhaps, you know, feeling frustrated or overwhelmed by this amount of information in its platforms like this, like your library that help ease that pain, and I think that’s what I what I see here, which is, it’s very easy to be drowned in the information.
We need to make decisions as quickly as possible once the project starts, there’s just no, there’s no time to lose. And I think you’re helping to smooth out that process. That’s really where I see that the sort of main benefit in terms of using this. So once you’re, once you’re building into the library, like what process are you using to screen or to filter materials?
What are you looking for as a sort of, oh, that’s suitable or that’s not suitable? Have you got your own internal benchmarks in terms of where you do or don’t accept the material?
Sustainability Standards for Materials on the Platform
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
That's a really interesting question. So first of all, I guess we live in a constant state of research within 2050. So we are always on the lookout for new new products, new materials, especially when they come from smaller companies that are just popping up whether it's a startup or a company that's been operating for a few years and we just have not seen it before.
But having said that, there is a very important point to be made about how we work. So we do not police what kind of product or manufacturer makes it on the platform, we actually want to have as many products as possible appearing there and we don't have a specific requirements for products to get on the platform, what we enforce as a library is that there needs to be some level of documentation that provides transparency on the impact of the product.
So, if you go to a library, you can look up concrete and you will find very heavily emitting concrete products and concrete manufacturers, we want to have these products, we understand the sector, at least for now still needs a lot of these products, what we ensure is we essentially put transparency over some some abstract assessment of what is a sustainable material or not, because there are no sustainable materials, in my opinion, there are materials that are suitable and can generate the Sustainable Design and there are materials that are non suitable, and the specific data related to each material does not necessarily give the answer to that.
So in short, anything can land on the platform, what we ensure when we onboard the product is that there is some level of transparency related to the impact of the material or the product is causing.
Matt Morley
Sounds like a very pragmatic and practical approach. So some degree of thinking on the part of the user is still recommended, you know, we're still going through that mental process of, of evaluating and arbitrage right, trying to decide which which one is the best in this case, and it may not be the most sustainable, as you said.
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, I guess that's, that's one of the things that initially, you know, you start and you are very ambitious, that you will give the perfect answer to everyone and point them to exactly the one thing and they don't have to spend any time thinking. Quite honestly, we very early this very early on, we decided, you know, the specialists are the designers, they are the architects, they know how to do the research to find the right kind of product or material.
So we are not trying to replace their their specialization and the work they know how to do, what we're trying to do is replace a process that would currently take something close to three or four or five hours to compare a few products to something they can do with essentially 10 clicks within two minutes.
Matt Morley
What is the business model going forward? Is it going to eventually be some kind of a paywall so that you pay for access to the materials or the materials suppliers, manufacturers paying to be listed? How do you how do you set things up from a commercial perspective?
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, so from a commercial perspective, we essentially list the way that we list products is is an important point as well. So we partner with essentially every certification body that is out there that certifies building material products, and furniture and all of that. And we on board the basic data that the certification bodies have.
So out of so we populate the platform, even without charging anyone really. So it's free for designers, it's free for suppliers. We currently do charge and work with suppliers when they want to have access to those pages, to enhance them to add data sheets to add better pictures to add more technical information that would help a designer actually finalize a specification or a procurement decision.
So that's currently how we work. On the project side of things, as I mentioned the beginning, there's a couple of projects that you can create as a user for free now, but that's going forward something that we would like to charge on a per project basis, obviously, as clients or regulators demand these kind of reports.
Evolving the Sustainable Materials Industry in Future
Matt Morley
That makes sense. Okay, and looking forward them to the next, say, five to 10 years. Where are you seeing this industry around healthy and sustainable materials evolving? Like what are the main sort of trends that you can see taking place that you expect to continue over the next five years or so?
A Data Driven Approach to a Climate Neutral Construction Industry
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, so I've said this a couple of times. I think, for us, you know, the key to moving towards the direction of Climate Neutral construction sector and design sector is the data. And that's why we've had so much focus on the data. I mean, moving forward, I think what's really interesting about data is we are starting to have some pretty amazing stuff that's happening on on the AI front and on the generative design front.
I think that more and more, we're starting to see solutions that can make suggestions and generate designs for architects and for interior designers that would allow them to meet certain goals. And again, I don't think we'll, we I, I don't see a scenario where architects are no longer needed or anything like that. I think this kind of doomsday thinking is really not something I agree with.
What I see is similar to all of the hype that's happening right now with Chat GPT, where you ask it questions, and you can have it give you a lot of suggestions, an architect can have very specific tools where they say, I'm trying to achieve a net zero building in central London for this kind of client, and it needs these XYZ specifications. And then a tool would be able to give you five different scenarios of designs, material products, that would actually allow you to get there.
Then again, it's up to you as a designer, or as a specialist to kind of do the next step and, and move from there. So I personally think that data alongside the whole AI revolution that's happening right now is going to open, amazing doors and something that to the mission that we have as 2050 of democratizing these kinds of assessments and understanding very much contributes to
Matt Morley
Yeah, that's a big idea. I like that one. And in terms of how the business evolves over the next 12 months, 24 months, like, what's the as an additional functionality expanding the, the depth and breadth of the library materials? And what are you working on this next year?
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, so we have, we are constantly working on onboarding more products. So currently, we are testing a very big push, which will expand your database to include almost every product that has an EPD globally. So that kind of does a big jump from around 4000 products to something like 50,000 products. So from a library perspective, we expect to have something in the next couple of months that is much more complete and uncover actually a lot more markets and the UK, which we've been focusing on.
On the product development side, we have some really exciting features and product pipeline around the projects tool. So currently, you're able to select you know, individual materials and make a list of your, of your materials that make up your projects. We're very much moving towards the direction of allowing, allowing people to create assemblies and see within a specific assembly what is best, and then allow them also to have some functionality of of saving their own assemblies.
Because a lot of designers architects, they reuse a lot of the designs they've done.
So our goal is to move towards a direction where you can actually start building your internal library of systems and assemblies that you're able to very quickly build projects with and also get quick assessments.
Matt Morley
Fascinating. sounds really interesting. Well, I'll be I'll be very happy to watch as you evolve over the next year, and hopefully, five or 10 years is growing the business. So listen, thanks so much for your time. Where can people find out more about the business where you what social media you engaging with at the moment?
Phanos Hadjikyriakou
Yeah, I think thanks a lot. Also for the time, people can just search for 20 Quickly materials on Google on LinkedIn. We're very active on LinkedIn, with content and educational articles and all of that stuff. And then the platform is is easily accessible and free on https://app.2050-materials.com/