The current construction sector is not sustainable. The sector produces 30% of global waste and 40% of human-generated CO2 emissions. It consumes 40% of the resources and energy we use. There is a lot of potential for improvement.

Dr. Guillaume Habert is professor of the ETH Zurich Chair of Sustainable Construction. In this podcast, he talks with students Natalie Feakins and Noah Pasqualini about sustainability in the built environment and how life cycle analysis, green labels, and concepts such as a material diet can help transform the construction industry. They highlight how projects like the Kunsthalle exhibition, organized by the Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture at ETH Zurich, can have an impact on circular construction.

Scanning is essential for knowing what materials are in buildings in order to renovate, reuse, or deconstruct them sustainably.  New and ever improving technologies help engineers understand what materials are in a building so that they can better plan what to do with them.

Romain Géry is the director of Scanways, a company based in Geneva that offers specialized digital surveying for architecture, engineering, and construction. Scanways produces high quality and high precision 3D scans, building information models, and virtual reality tours of buildings.

Episode credits: Interview by Catherine De Wolf and Jennifer Bartmess. Produced and edited by Jennifer Bartmess. Music by Coma Media. © Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture, ETH Zurich

 Many of the current efforts to mitigate climate change and its effects rely on digital solutions. But what would our designs for landscapes and buildings of the future look like if we slowed down and paid more attention to the traditional knowledge that humans have acquired over millennia?

Julia Watson is an urban designer and best-selling author on nature-based technologies for climate resilience. She teaches urban design at Colombia University in New York. In this interview, she discusses climate change awareness and indigenous technologies in sustainable building and education.

Read more about Julia Watson and look into her new book, Lo-TEK. 

Episode credits: Interview by Catherine De Wolf and Deepika Raghu. Produced and edited by Jennifer Bartmess. Music by Coma Media. © Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture at ETH Zurich

Human consumption far oversteps planetary boundaries. Limiting consumption and economic growth seems like an obvious strategy for cutting emissions and protecting the environment. But Alessio Terzi, economist for the European Commission, explains why degrowth is not feasible for achieving our sustainability targets. He also discusses his 2022 book, Growth for Good, Reshaping Capitalism to Save Humanity from Climate Catastrophe.

Episode credits: Interview by Catherine De Wolf. Produced and edited by Jennifer Bartmess. Music by Coma Media. © Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture, ETH Zurich

Digitalisation is crucial for making construction more sustainable and circular. But the sector is slow to digitalise its processes and often relies on fragmented data.

Martin Fischer, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, explains how digitalisation improves project management, automation, and building information modelling to better navigate tradeoff decisions for more sustainable construction.

Episode credits: Interview by Brandon Byers and Iro Armeni. Produced and edited by Jennifer Bartmess. Music by Coma Media. © Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture, ETH Zurich

Human habitats and their infrastructure require a lot of space and resources. Could mixed reality help architects and engineers build spaces that put less pressure on our urban environments?

Iro Armeni, professor at Stanford University, leads the Gradient Spaces Lab, where she combines computer science with architecture and engineering to create more circular, multifunctional, and reusable spaces.

Episode credits: Interview by Jennifer Bartmess and Deepika Raghu. Produced and edited by Jennifer Bartmess. Music by Coma Media. © Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture, ETH Zurich

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) are necessary for understanding the environmental impacts of buildings. André Stephan, associate professor at the University of Melbourne, researches how to scale up life cycle assessments so that they can be used to better understand the carbon footprint of the construction sector.

In this podcast he talks with Prof. Catherine De Wolf about computational tools, challenges in creating life cycle assessments for buildings made of reused materials, and how academia is responsible for reducing the environmental impact of construction.

See more on the Nested Phoenix project.

Episode credits: Interview by Catherine De Wolf. Produced and edited by Jennifer Bartmess. Music by Coma Media. © Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture, ETH Zurich