The wheel. The aqueduct. The smart phone. Like any pivotal invention, Green Badger was born out of necessity, frustration and inspiration. While employed as a director of sustainability at a real estate development firm out of Savannah, Georgia, in the early 2000s, Tommy Linstroth had spent the next decade gaining experience in sustainable design and construction, LEED certification, corporate sustainability standards and more.
“It was my task to help ensure that everything that we designed, constructed and operated was done with a sustainability focus,” says Linstroth. “I really cut my teeth figuring out what works and what doesn’t with our own dollars and our own portfolio.” After slogging through hundreds of projects and even more spreadsheets, Linstroth realized, “What I was doing was the same as my peers: an awful lot of manual work.”
As a steadfast advocate of green building, Linstroth constantly heard complaints around time consumption, expense and other high barriers to entry. Then one night, after fighting through to the end of the very last spreadsheet with bloodshot eyes, Linstroth thought to himself: “Man, there’s got to be a better way. Perhaps, how can we use technology to remove that barrier, decrease costs and increase performance?”
To help make buildings as green as possible, as painlessly as possible, Linstroth went on to found Green Badger in 2014. Today, Green Badger offers a variety of solutions—from LEED documentation to embodied carbon analysis to construction ESG—for a variety of audiences—general contractors to waste haulers—and also practices what it preaches:
Its employees walk, bike and telecommute to work; the company collaborates with local nonprofits; it offsets its own carbon output, participates in litter pickups, energy installations and tree plantings, and more.
As someone who, “loves LEED but hates LEED documentation,” Linstroth sat down with Construction Executive to discuss where the construction industry stands on the road to mid-century sustainability goals and how technology can facilitate its efforts over the coming decades.
You founded this company over a decade ago. You’ve been in the industry longer. So, you’ve been around for a lot of major milestones for construction and sustainability efforts. It is stereotyped that construction is not necessarily the fastest or most accepting industry in terms of integrating new technologies, ways to digitize and ways to build more sustainably. Would you say that you have seen that mold break over time?
I’d say there’s been a lot of progress, but there’s still a lot of room to grow. You know, when we started, people were not using things like Procore and Autodesk Construction Cloud. Every schedule was still in a spreadsheet. So, I think in general, whether it’s sustainability or not, the increased adoption of technology in construction has been profound.
And standards, like LEED, evolve every couple of years, so a lot of those older practices just inherently become obsolete. And it really turns into a great pivotal moment to adopt technology. And then especially as these requirements become more stringent you get to a point where you’ve got to have a technological solution because you’re trying to keep track and do all of the verification and validation of all of these attributes, which again might change. If you’re working on an airport project, then in five years, you’re still working on that project, there’s going to be a new slew of requirements.
It’s adapt or die, right? The goalposts have moved and they’re continuing to move exponentially as tech progresses. So, why is mid-century a good deadline to have to achieve certain sustainability markers? How realistic is it?
I think 2050 has just become part of the natural evolution of how we set goals, but part of it is also the science of climate change. Incremental change probably isn’t going to get us there, so we need a roadmap to plan these things out because it can’t happen overnight.
Knowing that we’re already halfway through this decade, what are some short-term goals the industry can aim for?
One of the challenges we see is that there has been a lack of benchmarking. So, it’s hard to even say how a company gets to 2050 if they don’t know where they’re starting today. I look at it sort of like a 401K. If you want to retire in 2050, you have to know what you’ve got in the bank today. It’s hard to say, ‘What do I need to do for the next 15 or 25 years so that I can get to my happy retirement in 2050?’ If we’re going with blinders on, it makes it tough. But the fun part is implementing strategies and tactics.
So, if we’ve got 25 more years to figure this out, the very first step needs to be taking account of where we’re starting from so that we can spend the next year or two focusing our efforts on what those immediate short-term goals need to be.
You can’t hope you’re going to get there. You need to have a plan in place. You need to have a business strategy in place that’s going to help you map out and achieve these goals.
Regarding companywide culture and buy-in, what types of technology would you say can aid that process?
There’s no wrong way to start and there’re some free and easy tools out there to help get that baseline level of data pulled into place. No one’s saying you need to go hire a 50-person team or bring in a million-dollar consultant. These are things you can do with teams internally as part of your day-to-day job. That investment as a business strategy can help you win more work. It can help you retain and attract talent. We already know the labor shortages that are facing the industry, so why would you not do these things that can help you win more work and help your company attract and retain top talent? And it seems that the cost or the risk of not doing these things is vastly greater than the risk of establishing a sustainability strategy.
Regarding the skilled-labor shortage, would you say that companies are having to rely more on technology to fill those holes?
I think it turns into an opportunity. We don’t have enough people and there are too many hours and too many things to do and not enough people to do them. Well, what is your alternative? You can make your people work 80 hours a week and get a whole bunch of burnout and put people in conditions they shouldn’t be working in, or you can find technological solutions that can help alleviate that concern. And sustainability is one component. There’s plenty of things on a jobsite where you can free up additional people’s time. I think as we take a hard look at how we can account for not having enough boots on the ground, we find alternative solutions, and technology is the lowest hanging fruit and the most cost effective one that I think everybody can start to leverage across the board.
Comparison is the thief of joy, but are there any companies or projects that stand out to you that exemplify best practices in this realm?
Comparison is tough because if you’re building a three-story garden-style apartment complex, your world looks a lot different than if you’re building a downtown skyscraper. You can’t even compare those two in terms of practical applications and end results. But I can say from folks we’ve worked with, we’ve seen some pretty cool initiatives that companies are taking to drive change in the industry—namely benchmarking and carbon tracking across all of their projects. Again, whether the owners are asking for it or not, these construction companies are taking a leadership role and saying we really need to understand what impact we can truly have on the materials that we are selecting and we’re going to proactively choose to start looking at this to be healthy in the industry.
This is not something they’re keeping inhouse either. They publish it and they put it out there and help others in the industry understand where those opportunities are so that we can all rise to the occasion.
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