From construction to day to day operations, the life of every building has a carbon cost. In fact, fossil-fuel combustion from residential and commercial buildings accounts for roughly 29 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Every kilowatt of energy, BTU of heating gas, cleaning supply, and piece of copy paper exacts a cost on our environment.

But our carbon footprints aren’t all attributed to the resources we consume once a building is up and running. Embodied carbon from the materials that go into constructing a building in the first place—the concrete, the wood and the windows–all add up to an additional 11% of global greenhouse gas production. 

For responsible builders and owners, reducing or eliminating that footprint is imperative, as the negative impacts of climate change become an existential threat to life as we know it. Fortunately, carbon neutrality, or even negativity is possible, and it’s becoming easier to accomplish through the technologies we’re creating at Tesseract Ventures.

“To solve a problem, you need to be able to define it. Data is critical for setting goals, and identifying paths to increased efficiency, and tracking progress. Tesseract has developed a data-driven tech ecosystem that can help people build and operate smart buildings more efficiently, significantly reducing carbon footprints from beginning to end.” 

– John Boucard CEO Tesseract Ventures

Prism is a suite of next-generation real time location tracking (RTLS) devices that collect rich data from every aspect of your operation, from infrastructure to human behavior, while our Mosaic software platform organizes and visualizes the info. Mosaic’s artificial intelligence tools can also find patterns to identify issues and opportunities. 

During the building phase, Prism’s customizable system of RTLS sensors and anchors can keep track of materials and supplies, ensuring everything is where it should be and that nothing goes to waste. It can also track labor and building processes, feeding the data to Mosaic’s AI so it can identify patterns that improve productivity and reduce energy consumption. Every step of the way, the technology is learning from the process to improve financial and environmental outcomes. 

This system can then be converted to collect and analyze data in the new building. In this new smart environment, sensors on an HVAC system can identify waste and maintenance issues before they cause problems. Other sensors can track supplies around the building, flagging redundancies. Badges worn by occupants illuminate the patterns of behavior and use of the space by humans. Knowing certain areas are highly trafficked while others are under-utilized can allow for adjustments in energy use, office layouts and other solutions for improved efficiency.

Without tracking the data, organizations looking to reduce their carbon footprint are working in the dark, playing a guessing game to estimate what might have gone into creating their building, and how much carbon they produce. When armed with a building’s entire carbon history, from the day the foundation was poured to the present, a business or building owner can see what they need to do to retroactively negate their carbon impact, while making informed decisions about consumption in the present.