Since graduating from business school in June, I have had the pleasure of reconnecting with many old friends, colleagues and industry professionals. It hasn’t come as a surprise to hear many of them ask, “how does Bundle impact health and sustainability?” Having been the “healthy materials person”, “materials specialist” or “sustainability consultant” to many of them, I saw this one coming.

Luckily, Edison and I have been thinking about Bundle’s role in improving sustainability and health from the very beginning, albeit in a more indirect way than in my pre-GSB life.

As the first procurement platform that enables builders and suppliers to buy, sell, and manage construction materials from quote to delivery, Bundle provides the perfect opportunity to simplify environmentally friendly purchasing. One of the biggest challenges in evaluating embodied carbon and other sustainability attributes of products is that there are typically many stakeholders ordering many different products on every project. Bundle consolidates and simplifies this process. Let me explain.

First and foremost, Bundle enables greater transparency throughout the product procurement process, which helps builders avoid waste generation through product mis-orders, over-orders and delivery delays. Leveraging industry research about carbon emissions on construction sites, and specifically emissions resulting from on-site construction (versus product manufacturing or transportation, which may also be mitigated with Bundle), Bundle is predicted to eliminate at least 25% of product overage waste or order errors. This results in saving an estimated 9 million metric tons of CO2 each year worldwide. As a comparison, that is roughly equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted from driving 1,957,319 passenger cars for a whole year.

Second, as an end-to-end procurement solution, integration with existing healthy and sustainable material databases is high on our product roadmap (especially my favorite, mindful MATERIALS). For suppliers, this gives environmentally-friendly products a competitive advantage through increased exposure and marketability to a broad network of customers. For builders, if all products are purchased on one consolidated platform, sustainability attributes and total project carbon become much easier to calculate.

Lastly, we have longer-term dreams of a building materials resale market. Even if products are ordered incorrectly, Bundle’s marketplace infrastructure allows for easy resale of materials rather than scrapping them in a landfill or sending them back to the supplier.

In support of our mission to promote sustainability within the building industry, we were honored to receive an innovation grant from Stanford’s TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and look forward to working together with sustainability experts in the TomKat community. Over the past few weeks, we have been excited to hear from so many of you that you want to see sustainability front and center as part of our vision. With Bundle, we’re aiming to not only simplify procurement across the construction industry, but to also make purchasing healthy and sustainable materials a given, rather than a chore.