Building design and construction strategies for a circular economy

Abstract

The considerable environmental impacts, resource consumption and waste generation emanating from buildings are a cause of great concern and political attention. Interest in the circular economy (CE) concept of slowing, narrowing and closing material loops through CE strategies (reuse, repair, refurbish, recycle and recover) has grown in recent years to facilitate minimising these unresolved issues emanating from the building industry. Although CE initiatives are proliferating within the industry, wide-scale adoption of CE is still lacking, and the current development and implementation of CE building design and construction strategies is fragmented. Through a systematic literature review (SLR), this study assesses which design and construction strategies are being linked to the concept of CE for new buildings, and their level of application and readiness in a building context. On this basis, the study offers insight into how this field of research is developing and provides directions for future research. From the SLR, a taxonomy is presented that groups the strategies together into 16 overarching building design and construction strategies. An important gap preventing a greater CE uptake within the industry was found to include the lack of knowledge about the environmental performance and related benefits of the various building design and construction strategies. Thus, it is suggested that conveying more comprehensive and uniform adoption of CE in the building industry requires the development of a new design typology to facilitate CE-oriented decision-making in a building context and that prioritises the strategies according to their potential in terms of minimising building-related environmental impacts.

How Lack of Knowledge and Tools Hinders the Eco-Design of Buildings—A Systematic Review

“…There is very limited knowledge on the environmental consequences of applying the strategies, and even though the strategies exist guidance on how to, for example, Design for Adaptability is lacking. The lack of knowledge amongst designers make them take decisions based on intuition or tacit knowledge, instead of making decisions based on evidence [27,120]. Furthermore, it can be seen from the identified barriers and the related means to overcome them that none of the stakeholders, internal as well as external, are identified as being responsible for providing this knowledge.…”

“…Designing for a circular economy is about reducing, reusing and recycling, in that prioritized order, waste from a building and better managing material resources [118,119]. Design initiatives for a circular economy can be designing for modularity and off-site construction (use of prefabricated elements), Design for Adaptability, design for durability, Design for Disassembly, design for material recycling, Material Selection/Substitution, optimize shape and dimensions for reduced material consumption, minimize the number of different materials and components used, design components in layers dependent on their anticipated lifetime [28,[118][119][120]. Consequently, aspects of all the other strategies, except energy-efficient design, are considered in the Design for Circular Economy approach.…”

“…Furthermore, designing for recycling might not be beneficial if the recycling process itself is too resource demanding [123,125]. Furthermore, due to a lack of knowledge on environmental effects of implementing a certain circular economy design initiative the choice is most often based on intuition [120]. Another key challenge to this strategy is a lack of tools, guides and standard practices that could help designers over the uncertainties and difficulties with considering the buildings end of life during design [118,119,121].…”

Towards Circular Social Housing: An Exploration of Practices, Barriers, and Enablers

“…The concept of Circular Economy (CE) has been embraced as an approach for minimising resource inputs and outputs by introducing cyclic principles [5], avoiding waste and pollution, and creating regenerative systems [6]. The concept gained traction in Europe in the early 2010s with the efforts of Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) along with the introduction of the first Circular Economy Action Plan [7,8]. Indeed, many European countries [9], including the Netherlands [10], have developed several strategies and action plans, in which the construction sector takes a pivotal role as one of the main priorities in the transition towards a CE.…”

“…Research on CE in the built environment covers various dimensions, with some researchers focussing on the material innovation while others address CE implementation at city scale. For example, Marie and Quiasrawi [11] studied the properties of recycled aggregates that are reintroduced in the concrete life cycle multiple times, van Stijn and Gruis [12] proposed a circular housing retrofit strategy for modular building components, Eberhardt and colleagues [7] conducted a systematic literature review to determine which building design and construction strategies are associated with circularity for new buildings, and Prendeville and colleagues [13] investigated how six European cities are implementing CE as a strategy. Furthermore, several researchers have proposed tools [14][15][16] and assessment methods [17] to support circular building processes, while others conducted systematic literature reviews to demonstrate the state-of-the-art of CE research [18,19] and identified barriers [20] for CE implementation in the built environment.…”