#17: How Do You Audit a Tower?

Host: In 1889, most of the buildings of the World's Fair were designed in wrought iron. The Eiffel Tower was no exception, with its 18,038 pieces of iron from the minds of East of France. Today, architects and engineers would recommend his steel for its many qualities. The problem for the city: Its manufacturing emits a lot of CO₂.

Antoine: Concretely, engineers and architects are making design decisions around materials at the very beginning of the project. So, when they design a tower, when they design a building, they will choose the right material depending on its performance, its cost, and possibility, its sustainability, if we are building a tower, we have to cut the material impact of this tower, because it will represent a lot of GHG emissions in particular, and we know steel can be made in the medium term with a lower environmental impact at the quantity that is required for the new tower.

When you design a process, you will design it in our systems, in CATIA, for instance. You can design the instruments and the flow diagram that the material will follow along its life cycle inside the processing plants. Then, what you can do is, you can really see, look at the environmental impact of each step. So, it is a big change in terms of designing new processes, because you will use this environmental impact, this environmental constraint very early in the design process.

Xavier: Now, it's revolutionary, because you do this overall assessment, and we do it in context of the virtual twin, which enables to communicate and collaborate widely across the enterprise; not only a few automotive experts doing the assessment.

Host: Once the manufacturers were identified, the experts carried out an audit of the most impactful points to reduce even more of the carbon footprint of our tower.

Antoine: Everything. And so, for instance, when we were looking at the environmental impact of a ton of steel, we saw that the transportation was quite important. So that's why we are changing the type...

Xavier: LCA stands for Life Cycle Assessment. It is a methodology to measure the environment impact across the whole life cycle of a product, and it's a multi-criteria method, meaning that you can measure CO₂, but also other criteria like water, resource depletion.

Antoine: So, when we look, then, at the life cycle assessment of the material itself, we can pinpoint the various impacts; so, manufacturing process, raw material sourcing, logistics, mining, etc. When looking at the Eiffel Tower, we are looking at a building that has been kind of circular from its inception. During the 130 years of its existence, we have changed parts. In this new tower, our idea is to continue this idea of circularity. So, we have designed a tower that can be productized, that can be dismantled, that can be also recycled. And this is really to give hope that sustainability and circularity are possible.

Host: By optimizing the sourcing and the use of steel at each production step, the experts managed to considerably limit its CO₂ emissions. Good news for our new tower, but we were not done yet with steel. A final polluting stage still needed to be optimized: its transport from the steel plant to the site.

Narrator: To view the full documentary, and find out more about the Building Tomorrow project, visit 3ds.com/insights/building-tomorrow.

Disruptors Unleashed is produced by Dassault Systèmes. For more episodes, follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer, or your nearest streaming platforms. To learn more about Dassault Systèmes, visit us at 3ds.com.