By Kristin Brubaker
Head of Sustainable Construction Services
Most green building events are built around long panels and slow build-ups. The BE+ Tech Forum is not. Built Environment Plus held its Tech Forum in Boston on Thursday, August 6, and the format moved fast: three rooms running at once, roughly fifteen lightning talks per room, five minutes each, from five in the evening until about nine-thirty, with networking on both ends.
Five minutes is a real constraint. Nobody gets to warm up, and nobody gets to bury the point on slide nineteen. You either have something to say, or you do not. By the end of the night, I had a notebook full of ideas that had been stripped down to their essentials, which is a better souvenir than most events hand out.
Here is what stood out.
Why Embodied Carbon in Construction Gets Decided in the Field
Here is why that gap matters. We talk about sustainability in the built environment as a design problem, and design does set the ceiling. But a very large share of what determines a building’s certified performance gets decided, documented, and either captured or lost long after the drawings are stamped.
Substitutions happen in the field. Environmental Product Declarations arrive buried inside submittal packages. Waste gets loaded into a dumpster by a subcontractor who was never told what the project’s diversion target is. When nobody captures that information at the moment it happens, the final number is a reconstruction at best and a guess at worst. Green building compliance lives or dies in those weeks, not in the design charrette.
Three talks in my room made that case, each lasting five minutes. Here is what they covered and why it should matter to anyone doing the work.
Embodied Carbon in Construction Has Moved from Optional to Required
I used my own slot to make a narrow argument: the industry keeps solving for carbon as though carbon were the only thing on the list.
Owners are asking for carbon numbers at project kickoff. Buy Clean laws are setting state-by-state limits on global warming potential. LEED v5 moves embodied carbon assessment from a nice-to-have to a prerequisite. Any one of those is a real lift. Arriving together, they are a wall.
The answer is not one more single-purpose calculator. Carbon did not replace waste tracking, indoor air quality, health product declarations, or transparency documentation. It joined the list. What general contractors need is a single workflow that carries embodied carbon in construction alongside everything else green building compliance already requires, from design intent through the punch list.
That is exactly what we have been building at Green Badger, and the newest features I demoed all serve that one idea. Our direct integration with EC3 puts every Environmental Product Declaration in North America, more than 104,000 of them, into one searchable database instead of being scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets. Pull up a product, and its global warming potential is color-coded against your project baseline, red above and green below, so your project engineer is not doing that math after hours. Compare products side by side, and Green Badger automatically returns the embodied carbon analysis and LEED point math.
The materials dashboard then shows the full embodied carbon picture while tracking waste, energy, indoor air quality, and your other sustainability goals in the same place and in real time, rather than sending someone on a scavenger hunt every time an owner asks for a status update. We also added AI that reads utility bills to automatically capture A5 construction-phase emissions, instead of doing it by hand. Zoom in, and you see a single dial for embodied carbon tracked live. Zoom out, and it is one dial of thirty: waste, water, health, transparency, compliance. Carbon joined that list rather than replacing it, and for the first time, you can see all of it in one place.
Nobody Is Auditing Your C&D Waste Numbers
Michael Orbank of Structure Tone gave the talk I have thought about most since Thursday. His topic was rethinking construction and demolition waste practices, and his central point was uncomfortable: there is essentially no accountability for accuracy in waste reporting.
He spoke from firsthand experience. Recycling percentages come back from haulers as clean, confident figures, and very often nobody on the project team has asked how those figures were produced. His request of the audience was refreshingly simple. Start questioning your C&D waste data. Ask where the numbers came from.
That data feeds a long list of downstream decisions: LEED credits, corporate sustainability targets, carbon reporting, internal goal setting, and, as he put it plainly, basic professional ethics. Junk data in, junk data out. You cannot improve waste practices on a jobsite without accurate information about what is actually leaving it.
The practical fix he pointed to was source separation. Separating streams on-site, rather than relying on a single mixed dumpster and a facility-wide average, produces a number you can defend. He also noted that source separation frequently comes with cost savings, which tends to be the version of this argument that gets an owner’s attention fastest.
Thirty Percent of Delivered Materials Are Never Used
Mohammad Shwiqi presented ReMat opened with a figure that should stop any superintendent cold. Roughly 30 percent of the materials delivered to a construction site are never used.
He set that against a disposal picture that keeps getting tighter. As of 2023, about 79 percent of Massachusetts landfill capacity was already consumed, and waste exported out of state carries an additional disposal cost of about $80 per ton. The surplus is not only waste in the environmental sense. It is a line item that grows every year.
ReMat’s answer is a materials marketplace that uses AI to match surplus materials with the projects that need them. Think of it as Facebook Marketplace, except it knows what a submittal is and isn’t trying to sell you a used hot tub you really don’t need.
This is a construction-phase idea, not a design one. Surplus does not exist until material has been ordered, delivered, and left over. Nobody designs it in. It accumulates through buyout, over-ordering, change orders, and schedule shifts, which means the people best positioned to solve it are on site. Reuse is also one of the few embodied carbon levers still available after procurement closes, since reused material carries no new manufacturing emissions.
What Proportional Airtime Would Look Like
What I appreciated most about the night is that BE+Tech is built for new ideas. A five-minute slot lowers the barrier for someone who is early in the work, still testing an approach, or bringing something to a room for the first time. That format surfaces innovation before it has been polished into a case study, which is exactly when the rest of us can still learn from it and help shape it.
I was glad to sit in on the construction-focused talks in particular. A hard look at whether our waste data can withstand scrutiny and a marketplace built to put surplus material back to work are both real innovations aimed squarely at the field. Add the compliance shift happening around embodied carbon in construction, and you have three ideas that will change how project teams operate over the next few years, all presented in fifteen minutes combined.
Thanks to BE+ for building a format that rewards new thinking, and to Michael and Mohammad for two of the sharpest five minutes of the evening. If you are working on something on the construction side of green building and want to compare notes, I would like to hear from you. Helping teams get there is what we do at Green Badger.
