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As one of the world's largest landlords and investors in renewable energy, Brookfield is taking another step in making it easier for tenants to measure and lower carbon emissions, by pioneering a digital waste-to-carbon program. The program is a part of the RESET Certified Net-Zero and Carbon Neutral living lab built at One East, and is powered by Akila, a digital twin platform for the built environment.
Waste is the largest source of carbon emissions from real-estate operations, after energy consumption. Research and audits show that wet waste in landfill produces large amounts of methane as it decomposes, a gas that is 25x more potent than CO2 in trapping heat in the atmosphere¹. Waste incineration also produces greenhouse gasses, as does the collection and transportation of waste².
Brookfield has implemented the world's first RESET Waste pilot project in order to measure and reduce carbon emissions for both landlords and tenants. Leveraging the RESET Standard enables Brookfield to manage waste in ways that were previously challenging, opening a pathway to directly quantify carbon emissions from waste per tenant, as well as rates of diversion.
Image above: One East by Brookfield
To fulfill the requirements of the RESET Waste Standard, One East deployed Akila building management software.
Akila's electronic IoT scale and software platform digitizes work orders and waste tracking information to identify which tenant or tenant floor the waste originated from. This system digitalizes a manual process, improves data quality, visualizes results, and allows data management on a tenant basis.
Image above: Waste management process optimization by the support of Akila
Data collected during the weighing of the waste is categorized and sent directly to Akila's cloud for additional analysis of tenants' performance. Concurrently, data is streamed to the RESET Cloud for third-party auditing and benchmarking. This arrangement makes it feasible to collect accurate waste data; making the automatic calculation of carbon emissions more reliable and actionable.
Image above: Waste dashboard
RESET's approach to waste tracking empowers landlords to anonymously rank and benchmark the performance of each tenant via the RESET Leaderboard, creating an incentive for tenants to decrease their carbon footprint from waste while achieving sustainability targets and environmental reporting requirements.
This pilot project with Brookfield and Akila fills an important gap in the measurement of waste and related carbon footprints. The program also sets a more reliable baseline for future projects and individual tenants to benchmark against.
Finally, additional ways to improve the process and reduce waste will be discovered as a byproduct of leading this unprecedented initiative. We celebrate Brookfield and Akila for leading the market on waste and carbon emission reduction.
James B, Phil M, Amy G, Robert B.,(2021). Your Trash Is Emitting Methane In The Landfill. Here's Why It Matters For The Climate. [Online] Available at https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1012218119/epa-struggles-to-track-methane-from-landfills-heres-why-it-matters-for-the-clima.
ZWE S.,(2020). Understanding the carbon impacts of Waste to Energy incineration. [Online] Available at https://zerowasteeurope.eu/2020/03/understanding-the-carbon-impacts-of-waste-to-energy/.
RESET® is a data standard, accompanied by a set of assessment tools, created and managed by GIGA to develop actionable, long term strategies towards health and sustainability for the built environment. RESET focuses on creating a structure around data and analytics to generate opportunities for improvement and optimizations by combining the development of continuous monitoring and cloud software to increase the visibility of health and sustainability data in the built environment.
For more information about RESET, please visit: https://www.reset.build/