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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1313659
C O N S T R U C T I O N Clim ate C ontrolle d BCBUSINESS.CA NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020 BCBUSINESS 31 Green building? It's still mostly an oxymoron. Building and construction accounted for almost 40 percent of all energy-related carbon emis- sions as of 2017, the World Green Building Council estimates. And don't get us started on landfill: annual construction waste will hit 2 billion tonnes by 2025, according to U.S.- headquartered Transparency Market Research, almost double the total for 2018. Nexii Building Solutions aims to help change that. The Vancouver- based company's proprietary building material, Nexiite, is a lower-carbon alternative to concrete. Nexii also offers what it calls a "whole building solution" for properties ranging from commercial to single-family; most work takes place offsite, resulting in faster construction, less waste and lower local impact. Its buildings, assembled from panels, are highly energy-efficient, too. Led by Stephen Sidwell, who previously founded healthy frozen food startup Luvo, Nexii recently welcomed two high-profile board members: Michael Burke, chair and CEO of U.S. infrastructure giant AECOM; and Ronald Sugar, chair of Uber Technologies and an Apple director. To meet customer demand, the 105-employee business, which has a plant in Moose Jaw, Sask., is expanding stateside. It's now building four new facilities, in Squamish, Alberta, Ontario and Pennsylvania. –N.R. P R O P T E C H Re al Chang e Who says you need big bucks to play the housing market? Formerly Imby, Vancouver-based Addy Technology Corp. aims to bring real estate invest- ment to the masses, making it possible to get in on residential properties for as little as $1. Investors then reap profits through the sale of the home or from rental income. "What's wrong with real estate is it hasn't changed," Michael Stephenson, who co-founded Addy with Jeff Booth, Stephen Jagger and Adrienne Uy, told BCBusiness in 2018. "Current real estate is established to be binary: either you're all in or you're all out." –N.C. to be like, Hey, look what I've found; I think I have a good route. More and more bees will follow that route, and while they do that, they'll find side routes along that direction." Similarly, Routific's algo- rithm directs CPU power the way bees spend their time fly- ing around, constantly search- ing for the best route. In developing his company, Kuo surveyed 11,250 small and medium-sized businesses, finding that 72 percent of them were still planning routes manually by hand, typically spending hours every morning using spreadsheets and Google Maps. "Not only was this a big waste of time, the routes that they were coming up with were simply not efficient," he says. "The human mind is not designed to solve such a com- plicated mathematical puzzle." As the world came to rely on delivery even more than usual after the pandemic forced people into their homes, the demand for Routific's software and the shortening of those routes grew. "If you have the super- small problem of 57 addresses and you want to find the optimum sequence, there are already quattuorvigintillion combinations—that's a one with 75 zeros," Kuo says, with a laugh. Besides helping nonprofits, Routific has another goal for the common good: making a positive impact on the environ- ment. By shortening routes, the 25-employee company has taken cars off the road. In one case, a FedEx customer in California was using 20 trucks before Routific shrank its fleet by five while allowing the same number of deliveries. "Every driver that switches from a manual route to using Routific is equal to planting 86 trees a year in terms of carbon emis- sion reductions," Kuo says. "In 2019 alone we quantified, across our entire customer base, that we've cut carbon emissions equivalent to plant- ing 500,000 trees. Which is essentially Stanley Park in one year." –N.C. Nexii makes a lower-carbon alternative to concrete