Rethinking buildings through Circular Design
You may have already heard about the words “circular design” in a product creation process, but what does it exactly mean?
The term Circular Design aims to describe the creation of products and services for the circular economy. It means thinking of products with their end of life in mind and reducing their impact throughout their lifecycle. In the construction sector, we have to rethink how we develop our buildings, beginning by looking deeper in the raw material sourcing and location of these materials, by focusing on the reuse and the recycling of materials instead of using new ones, by reducing their maintenance and reparation in usage and by thinking of their disposal, reuse and recyclability at their end of life.
Circular economy applied to Buildings
Currently, 10-15% of building materials are wasted during the construction and most of the demolition materials are landfilled. To avoid material waste we must adopt a circular economy approach by:
Sourcing raw materials locally in order to reduce carbon emission due to transportation.
Focusing on the use of biobased materials: they are biodegradable and created from biomass. As such they are natural, do not have polluting or toxic ingredients if not treated, and they remove carbon from air by sequestering it and transforming it.They can be looped back as they can potentially be reused or recycled in other material cycles or byproducts.
Maximizing the use of recyclable materials and trying to maintain them to their original efficiency. We can use circular materials such as plastics, natural fibers or metals even if they lose their performance through recycling processes we still can
Reusing buildings structure and components to rebuild instead of adding new materials to the loop.
Designing flexible buildings for simple adaptation, deconstruction and reconstruction. Flexible designs allow for buildings to be reused for other uses and to have extensions added instead of complete deconstruction and new constructions.
All this makes it possible to reduce material needs in the first place and waste production at the end of the process. By reducing those two factors, the building construction sector potentially reduces the embodied carbon of the building, improves material transparency and reduces our impact on natural ecosystems.
The combination of the Life Cycle Analysis with a Circular Design approach
The next step for companies is not only rethinking the way of building through Circular Design but also to make sure their projects have a minimum impact on the environment over the entire period of its life.
In order to do that, buildings can be evaluated by a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) methodology that assesses its environmental impacts through its conception, manufacturing, use and end of life. By combining the circular economy principles with LCA methodologies, building stakeholders can measure the environmental performance of these projects and use this data to make valuable design choices. In fact, LCA generates tangible measurable proof that these buildings and their components have improved environmental footprints over their lifecycles and beyond.
The LCA process considers 6 key phases of the building cycle: material extraction, transportation, manufacturing, construction, demolition, and recycling. In every stage of this process there are inputs and outputs, waste is produced in some but then reused in others, it’s the Circular Economy process.
Impact on Embodied Carbon
39% of global energy related carbon emissions are produced by the building sector. From them about 28% are operational emissions meaning the carbon emitted during the use, management and maintenance of the building and about 11% from materials and construction. Indeed, embodied carbon represents the indirect carbon emissions related to building processes such as materials and construction. Most of these emissions come from land damage, energy and water use to extract, source, transport, manufacture and build, as well as emissions related to their usage and end of life.
Thanks to the circular design principles there is potentially no end to this process because the output of one system becomes the input of another. The waste is turned into value and the use of new materials is prevented. All in all, this allows to avoid phases that are carbon intensive and that produce mass un reusable waste.
To learn more: Join Our Event "The Green Real Estate: Beyond Net Zero" on February 9th 2023!
