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GOING UP: How the Elevator Industry is Helping Ensure a Safer Healthier Experience for CRE
from 2022 Insight Issue 1
by Editor
GOING UP
How the elevator industry is helping ensure a safer, healthier experience for CRE
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By: Kevin Robertson, EVP Sales, North America, TK Elevator
According to a McKinsey Global Survey of executives, COVID-19 increased the adoption of digital technologies by several years, and many of these technological changes are here to stay. And just in time. In order to ensure a healthy return to buildings, property managers have needed to demonstrate a healthy commitment to those tenants, occupants and visitors relying on them to keep them safe.
Prior to the pandemic, the elevator industry began implementing digital technologies that limited touch points. Dispatching systems were being adopted where tenants and guests would simply input their floor destination into a lobby kiosk, and the elevator would be selected for them and other passengers with similarly located destinations. Now, as property managers seek to eliminate touch points, passengers can simply use an app via their smartphone or wearable device to make their floor selection. The technology has the capability to recognize a specific tenant once they enter a building and, based on the information previously provided to their profile, will have an elevator automatically selected for them and take them to their destination.
The elevator industry is also prioritizing data and IoT to ensure smarter building management by providing actionable intelligence that improves operational efficiency. The most prevalent is the increased acceptance and inclusion of predictive maintenance technology that can diagnose a building problem or elevator issue before one occurs, while also providing elevator usage data that helps property managers understand building traffic patterns to run their facilities more efficiently.
For example, according to data from TKE’s IoT connected elevators in the greater Atlanta area, elevator traffic in office buildings was up 26% in January 2022 compared to January 2021, but still was 61% below pre-pandemic levels. By comparison, elevator traffic in residential buildings in the greater Atlanta area was up 18% in January 2022 compared to January 2021 but only 16% below prepandemic levels. This insight, not possible as recently as five years ago, has forever changed how buildings will be managed moving forward. And while the pandemic has inspired a variety of tech enhancements in the elevator industry, it also exposed another area that needed heightened focus – health and wellness.
A HEALTHIER APPROACH
An AIA report from 2020 found that 79% of architects want to specify more sustainable materials than they do today – 97% among millennials. And while these architects recognize they hold responsibility for sustainability in the built environment, yet only onethird feel they are meeting that responsibility today.
Also, less than two-thirds of architects use product certificates and disclosures like Cradle to Cradle, Declare labels, Health Product Declarations (HPDs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to determine whether a product is sustainable. That number should be higher, especially at a time when building health and safety is being so closely scrutinized worldwide.
Every commercial and residential building supplier and owner should be challenging themselves to provide and implement the healthiest and safest products possible. For elevator companies, that starts with gaining a better understanding of the material ingredients used to create their products and their impacts on human health and the environment. One positive step is for elevator companies to disclose the materials within their products.
Material ingredient disclosure begins with a discovery process of truly learning about what chemicals and components are in the products a manufacture creates and from where those materials are coming. With the information, manufacturers can compare to hazardous chemical lists to understand how their product may be contributing to the overall health of the building and take action to improve.
Congruent with material transparency, elevator companies can drive environmental transformation by developing an EDP on their products. An EPD is a third-party verified objective report that communicates what a product is made of and how it impacts the environment across its entire life cycle – from material extraction and production to shipping, use and disposal. EPDs are meant to help better inform companies on how they can improve product design,
Both EPDs and material ingredient disclosures (in approved formats) on products can help buildings earn credit toward LEED v4, the most rigorous version of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the U.S. Green Building Council.
And in Georgia, the future of the elevator industry will be reimagined in a LEED certified building like no other.
A BEACON OF INSPIRATION
TK Elevator’s recently opened Innovation and Qualification Center (IQC) at The Battery Atlanta features the tallest elevator test tower in North America, along with numerous tech- and sustainability-focused components that exemplify the industry’s bright future. The building will not only test some of the fastest elevators in the world under numerous intense environments, but it will also test TKE’s unique elevator system featuring two cabs operating independently in the same shaft, coined TWIN. The building also has the capability to test the world’s first and only rope-less and sideways-moving elevator for high-rise buildings.
In its pursuit of LEED Gold certification, TKE’s IQC recognized a 12% reduction in embodied carbon compared to typical construction through concrete mix optimization – using ground granulated blast furnace slag and fly ash. This approach saved 2.36 million pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions. The IQC also achieved more than 40% reduction in potable water use compared to baseline buildings through the selection of efficiency flush and flow fixtures that will save 60,000 gallons of water annually. The IQC also utilizes a Smart Building metering system, which fully integrates specialty equipment such as HVAC and lighting. The Department of Energy estimates that a building employing this system can realize up to 45% energy savings. Also, the elevators in the test tower feature energy-friendly components that feed energy back into the building, including regenerative drives, LED lights and controllers with deep-sleep or hibernation mode.
TK Elevator also prioritized the materials used throughout the IQC, installing products that were produced with a high recycled content, reducing the need for raw materials and ensuring natural resources could be preserved. This includes using carpet comprised of recycled PET plastic, flooring tile verified to have the lowest global warming potential among comparable products, as well as finish materials tested and proven to have low VOC emissions, contributing to a healthier indoor air quality.
Property managers and building owners continue to focus on the health and safety of their tenants, and now the elevator industry has brought numerous touchless technologies to market to improve rider experience while focusing on how they can make their elevator systems and, by extension, buildings healthier for future generations.
About the Author
Kevin Robertson is the EVP Sales, North America for TK Elevator. He has held various management positions throughout his 20-year career with TK Elevator. He previously served as the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing and prior to that was the Senior Vice President for the Northeast region. Mr. Robertson currently lives with his wife in Alexandria, Va.
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