Specialist construction software coders are needed to develop an integrated technology solution that could hold a singular database of all high-rise building materials, according to a recent roundtable discussion held hosted by Glass Express Midlands.
The discussion brought together Liz Williams, Housing Delivery Expert at Land Specialist UK, Gurprit Bassi, Director at Wintech Façade Engineering, and Aneel Kilaire, Associate Façade Consultant at Ramboll UK, alongside Arun Photay, Managing Director of Glass Express Midlands.
“At the moment we are really paper-heavy in the industry”, explains Liz. “We need to ensure that construction and installations– whether this is newbuild or retrofit – meet current regulatory compliance, and we need to be more in-tune with technology to do this.”
A potential solution was ideated amongst the delegates involving one overarching, cloud-based database, built by a team of skilled software engineers working in tandem with building professionals, that would hold an online database of all the materials used for the construction of every new high-rise building.
“We’ve been to so many buildings where there was just no information there”, says Aneel. “If you look at the Grenfell tragedy, there was no understanding of the building and why the fire was spreading so quickly, because that information wasn’t readily available.”
Alongside its critical safety uses, the technology could also be integral to retrofitting projects, according to Gurprit; “Often, we’ll go to a building and ask for the Operational and Maintenance Manual and it’s in some dusty cupboard in the basement with half the pages missing, or somebody has gone bust, and nobody knows where it is.
“This makes maintaining a building extremely difficult and it could potentially put the safety of a building at risk if the incorrect materials are used to retrofit. A piece of software that encompasses the Manual online, and is available to contractors, maintenance workers and the fire brigade would fix this.”
And with the latest OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) data showing that, based on volume, construction and demolition waste is currently the largest waste stream in the EU, an online record of materials used in a building would also make it far easier to repurpose and recycle at the point of renovation or demolition in the future.
“Right now, if we were to decommission a building, it is very difficult to find out exactly what materials were used in that building, and this means that it is also very hard to know what to do with them”, continues Gurprit. “If we could quickly and easily ascertain if they’re recyclable or not, we could potentially save thousands of tonnes in landfill.”
“We already take part in the Saint-Gobain Glass UK ‘Glass Forever’ scheme, whereby we isolate all of our offcuts and cullet to send back to Saint-Gobain for remanufacture”, explains Arun. “So, if we were delivering replacement glass panels to a building, we would happily collect the old recyclable glass at the same time, to be taken back to our premises and integrated into Glass Forever.”
But for now, the focus needs to be on funding and supporting the development of such technology, says Liz.
“Ideally, we would create a critical path analysis for the construction of the software but in order to develop this technology, we’ve actually created a whole new requirement which is ‘coders for construction’ – specialised software developers who understand the intricacies of building.”
glassexpressmidlands.co.uk
