CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN

CONSTRUCTION
by
Vishal Duggal
PATIALA (Punjab)
Ph.: 98 140 059 33, 98766 05933
Email: [email protected], [email protected]

for
Short Term Course
Sustainable Concrete Construction – Issues and
Challenges
Department of Civil Engineering
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar NIT, Jalandhar (Punjab)
 From a world in crises…..
The world is in crisis.
The year 2018 started with an alarming message from the
world’s chief diplomat, the Secretary-General of the United
Nations, António Guterres, who issued a “Red Alert for the
World”, which he described as having gone in many ways
into “reverse” in the last 12 months.
The New Year’s resolution proposed by Guterres came in the
form of a call-out to humanity, challenging us all to:
“Narrow the gaps. Bridge the divides. Rebuild trust and bring
people together around common goals!”
 Resource Depletion
 Natural resources – Renewable and Non-renewable
 Resource depletion – exhaustion of resources/materials
from a region
 Use of resources beyond their rate of replacement
 Using resources in an unmanaged and unplanned manner
– causes pollution

Sustainable Development
“Development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs”
Bruntland Report, 1987
In Europe, >50% waste comes from
the building industry
 Some Facts

 More than 50% buildings, that will stand in 2030, are yet
to be built in India
 700-900 million m2 commercial and residential space
must be built every year in India
 The construction and operation of built environment
consumes 60% of all material in UK
 Construction, demolition and excavation waste accounts
for approximately 25-30% of all wastes in the EU
 Linear Economy
 Resource extraction increased 12-fold between 1900 and
2015, fuelling steep economic growth, with further
doubling forecast for the next 35 years to 2050
 Embedded deep within the “take-make-waste”, tradition
of the linear economy lies a toxic cocktail of negative
consequences, ranging from social inequality, to
depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution
and worsening of the risks and effects of climate change

Of the 92.8 billion tonnes of minerals, fossil

fuels, metals and biomass that enter the
global economy, only 9% is circular, i.e., re-
used annually.
Circle Economy (2019)
 Circular Economy
 Circular economy is waste free and resilient
 Central to both the vision of a circular economy and
key global SGDs is the ambition to tackle two of the
main negative effects of a linear model
 waste and excessive extraction of primary resources
 Targets to build overall system health by gradually
decoupling economic activity from the consumption
of finite resources
 Underpinned by a transition towards renewable
energy sources, and is based on three principles:
 Design out waste and pollution
 Keep products and materials in use
 Regenerate natural systems
 Circular Economy …
 The circular model distinguishes between technical
and biological cycles;
 where biologically based materials and building
components are generally designed to feedback into and
regenerate living systems
 while technical cycles recover and restore products,
components and materials through strategies like reuse,
repair, remanufacture or (as a last resort) recycling.
 The final goal is an ECONOMY….
 in which materials streams are efficiently managed and
recycled
 that runs entirely on the basis of renewable energy
 without negative effects on human life or the ecosystem
 Paradigm Shift

Waste Wealth
 Principles of Circular Economy
[1] Preserve and enhance natural capital by controlling
finite stocks and balancing renewable resource
flows
[2] Optimize resource yields by circulating products,
components, and materials at their highest utility at
all times, in both technical and biological cycles
[3] Foster system effectiveness by revealing and
designing out negative externalities
 All materials will – in theory – be infinitely recycled
 All energy is derived from renewable or otherwise
sustainable sources
 Human activities support and strengthen the ecosystem and
are natural capital
Embedding Circular Economy Principles
in the Construction Industry
FOR CLIENTS
[1] Commit to explore the circular economy
[2] Use the procurement process
[3] Encourage innovation and collaboration
[4] Set clear performance requirements
[5] Establish a minimum design life
[6] Take a whole life cost approach
[7] Start a dialogue with the supply chain
[8] Refurbish rather than demolish
[9] Commission a pre-refurbishment/demolition audit
Embedding Circular Economy Principles
in the Construction Industry
FOR DESIGNERS
[1] Advise your client
[2] Include the circular economy in design reviews
[3] Engage with manufacturers
[4] Align with the design life
[5] Design for ease of maintenance and upgrade
[6] Design for future flexibility
[7] Design for deconstruction
Embedding Circular Economy Principles
in the Construction Industry
FOR MATERIAL AND COMPONENT
SUPPLIERS AND MANUFACTURERS
[1] Communicate end of life options
[2] Consider takeback schemes
[3] Consider offering your product as a service
[4] Minimise waste during manufacture
[5] Optimise packaging
[6] Design for remanufacture
[7] Optimise use of secondary materials
Embedding Circular Economy Principles
in the Construction Industry
FOR CONTRACTORS
[1] Advise your client
[2] Procure from suppliers offering circular economy
benefits
[3] Eliminate waste
[4] Review the business case for procuring reused or
recycled components
[5] Use digitalisation and BIM to support the circular
economy
Embedding Circular Economy Principles
in the Construction Industry
FOR DEMOLITION CONTRACTORS
[1] Provide feedback
[2] Consider a pre-demolition audit
[3] Maximise reuse
[4] Measure and report
[5] Use digitalisation and BIM to support the circular
economy
Embedding Circular Economy Principles
in the Construction Industry
FOR EVERYONE
[1] Demonstrate leadership
[2] Develop your knowledge
[3] Consider end of life, upfront
[4] Set out the business case
[5] Use digitalisation and BIM to support the circular
economy
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
(for built environment)
 Introduced in Growth Within: a circular economy
vision for a competitive Europe – a report by the Ellen
MacArthur Foundation, McKinsey & Co., and SUN
 Identifies six different ways that organisations and
governments can think about applying circularity
[1] Regenerate
[2] Share
[3] Optimise
[4] Loop
[5] Virtualise
[6] Exchange
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
REGENERATE
Regenerating and restoring natural capital by:
 Safeguarding, restoring and increasing resilience of ecosystems
 Returning valuable biological nutrients safely to the biosphere (e.g.
through anaerobic digestion or composting, enabled by the separation of
technical and biological nutrients)
In the built environment:
 Use of renewable energy to power buildings (Solar, Wind, Geothermal,
Biomass, Tidal,
 Wave) – includes buildings as “energy generators” (e.g. solar panels on
roofs)
 Land restoration (saving virgin land, building on brownfield sites…)
 Resource recovery (regenerate organic waste, compost production…)
 Renewable production systems (bio-gas production, electricity
production…)
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
SHARE
Maximising product utilisation by:
 Mutualising the usage of assets (e.g. through sharing schemes or
exchange platforms)
 Reusing assets (e.g. through resell, redistribution)
In the built environment:
 Residential sharing (peer-to-peer renting…)
 Infrastructure sharing (parking sharing, shared infrastructure areas,
shared green areas…)
 Appliances / Tools sharing (sharing practises, sharing water…)
 Co-housing
 Office-sharing
 Shared water consumption (water treatment facilities)
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
OPTIMISE
Optimising system performance by:
 Prolonging products’ use period (e.g., through repair/maintenance,
design for durability and upgradability)
 Decreasing resource usage (e.g. increasing efficiency, designing out
waste)
 Optimising the logistics system through implementation of reverse
logistics
In the built environment:
 Industrial process, off-site production (prefabrication)
 Smart urban design (use inner-city vacant land, promoting compact
urban growth, high-quality urban environments, integrated, sustainable
and participative urban development…)
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
OPTIMISE
In the built environment….. :
 Energy efficiency (Integration in the environment, Building envelope,
equipment…)
 Water Efficiency (Reducing consumption grids, Re-circulation of water,
Using closed water, Water re-use…)
 Material Efficiency (Renewable, Recycled, Recyclable, Non-toxic
components, Lower energy content…)
 Reduction in transport
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
LOOP
Keeping products and materials in cycles by:
 Remanufacturing and refurbishing products and components (e.g.
through design for/of disassembly)
 Recycling materials (e.g. through making the right material choices in
the design process to ensure recyclability)
In the built environment:
 Optimisation of end-of-life of the building/materials (Durability,
maintenance, repair, upgrades, removal, deconstruction, re-use…)
 Modularity of the building (Modular building techniques, multi-purpose
volumes, flexibility in buildings…)
 Remanufacturing of materials (piece-by-piece demolition, material
banks, stock management…)
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
VIRTUALISE
Displacing resource use and delivering utility virtually by:
 Replacing physical products with virtual services (e.g. e-books instead of
books)
 Replacing physical with virtual locations (e.g. online shopping, video
conferencing)
 Delivering services remotely (e.g. cloud computing and storage)
In the built environment:
 Tele-working
 Virtualisation of products
 Virtualisation of processes (BIM, digital mock-up, automated
maintenance…)
 Smart appliances (smart home systems, connected appliances, efficiency
for lights…)
 The “ReSOLVE” Framework
EXCHANGE
Selecting resources and technologies wisely by:
 Shifting to renewable energy and material sources
 Using alternative material inputs (e.g. cascading by using by-products or
extracting biochemical feedstock from biological nutrients)
 Replacing traditional with advanced technical solutions (e.g. 3D
printing)
 Replacing product-centric delivery models with new service-centric ones
In the built environment:
 Better-performing materials (advanced materials discovery)
 Better-performing technologies (e.g. 3D-printing, building management
systems, electric engines)
 New products and services (e.g. multi-modal transport)
Any Questions …….???