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Free design The third annual summit was held this week at Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut. There, architects, business leaders, engineers, students, construction experts, technicians and other professionals gathered in SANAA’s pastoral setting to discuss ending forced labor in the global construction industry.
The summit was attended by thought leaders from MASS Design Group, WXY, BIG, Studio Cooke John Architecture + Design, SHoP, KPF, and the Yale Center for Ecosystems + Architecture; also attended by representatives from the United Nations, Arup, Shaw Industries, EVP, Bloomberg, Representatives from JPMorgan Chase, Hewlett-Packard and other giant companies.
WXY’s Claire Weisz and BIG’s Kai-Uwe Bergmann participated in a discussion about steering projects away from exploitative practices; Arup’s Fiona Cousins and MASS Design Group’s James Kitchin spoke about the ethics of materiality. Human trafficking survivor Nasreen Sheikh, who founded the Empowerment Collective — a nonprofit with a mission to end modern slavery — also had heartfelt words.
In recent years, clothing manufacturers have engaged in ethical rethinking, Eliminating slave labor in the fashion industry; Food manufacturers have also taken steps to ensure that items such as coffee beans are ethically sourced. But the construction industry 13% of global GDP, the speed of catching up is much slower. Grace Farms chief executive Sharon Prince said the global construction industry was one of the “biggest contributors to modern slavery and carbon emissions”.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) recently found that there are currently approximately 50 million people worldwide are enslaved; Millions of them are employed in the construction industry. Whether transporting bricks, mixing concrete, assembling solar panels, manufacturing PVC pipes or welding steel, millions of children and adults are abducted from their homes and forced into brutal labor conditions. In many cases, external forces such as global warming have rendered people’s towns uninhabitable, forcing them to seek income elsewhere by hook or by crook. The United Nations calls this category of people “climate refugeesAs a result, the situation is ripe for human traffickers to take advantage.
Additionally, global warming’s demand for green materials has spawned an entire exploitative industry. Sure, solar panels on rooftops might reduce energy consumption, and they might even earn larger buildings a shiny LEED plaque at their entrance. But the reason they’re so plentiful is because many of them are assembled cheaply in sweatshops. Officials who track this exploitation call it a “recognized slavery discount.”
Experts estimate that today, between 35% and 45% of global solar panels Made through forced labor.this PVC productionA common flooring and plumbing material and one of the most serious problems. Meanwhile, most of the furniture in American dormitories, or the trash cans on city streets, is abandoned. Produced by prison laboranother form of conquest.
To combat this threat, labor rights groups this year promoted a so-called “ethical decarbonization” movement at the Freedom to Design event, which recognizes addressing global warming and coordinating human rights abuses in the construction industry’s vast supply chains. necessity.
To do this, tech companies like The original image Already appeared. Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of Sourcemap and a former architect. More than a decade ago, Bonani noticed growing interest among architects, engineers and construction leaders who wanted to know more about where the products they specified came from, but there was no platform that made this information clearly visible.
Sourcemap helps identify Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, and Tier 4 providers. (Tier 1 suppliers are your standard material or service providers, which are window companies or general contractors, respectively. Tier 2, 3, or 4 suppliers purchase the materials and/or labor needed to manufacture windows—their products are Suppliers for your project use, but you won’t necessarily come face-to-face.) In short, if you want to know if the cobalt in your construction site’s batteries came from forced labor camps in Ghana, you go to Sourcemap. “Whenever we run our software, specifiers often find that there are 10 to 25 percent more manufacturers producing the product than they thought,” Bonani said at the Free Design Summit.
Looking ahead, new regulations set out by the European Parliament seek to hold construction professionals accountable for their involvement in the modern slave trade. On March 19, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament approved a new bill This requires companies with more than 1,000 employees and annual revenues of approximately $560 million to mitigate negative impacts on human rights and the environment. Companies that fail to comply will be fined and liable for damages.
The new bill is part of the Due Diligence Instructions for Corporate Sustainability Development, This requires companies to know who they are doing business with. “These are big and important laws. They could lead to the interception of goods at the border or result in a very large fine being imposed on a very well-known American company,” Bonani said. “The cost of compliance is actually quite low. They just need to map and trace the supply chain down to the raw materials, and there are tools to do that.”
“For these laws, certification is not important, research and auditing are most effective,” Bonani continued. “The real purpose of these laws is to get people to ask every supplier where their materials come from. If you don’t ask, that’s negligent; any roundabout way of not asking also means you’re disobeying. But if the supplier claims their Material comes from a farm or a forest, but that material didn’t actually come from there, then the responsibility is on them. It all starts with inquiry, tracking and accountability.”
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