Feature The circular economy
says Magdani. “That way, when it’s deconstructed, they can be resold again as a standard product.” The transition to a circular construction
industry is far from an overnight process, however, and construction is far more complicated than many industries. “Construction products are not like retail products, it’s a quite different business model,” says Jane Thornback, sustainability policy adviser at the Construction Products Association. “They’re around for many generations and are going to way outlive the companies or people who made them. An awful lot of this is to do with ownership. If somebody’s designing something with a brick, who owns it? The people who made the brick, the people who made the brick into something else, or the people who demolish the bricks 300 years later?”
Diverse sector Construction is also a very diverse sector, and circular economy principles are likely to be more easily applied on an out-of- town retail shed than a Cambridge college, for instance. Equally, the service contract model will work better for non-structural elements, such as internal partitions or M&E systems in which individual components can be replaced. There are many legal and commercial issues to be addressed, such as intellectual property rights, and standards and warranties for reused components. Ensuring suppliers are fi nancially stable enough to complete a building project is always a concern for a main contractor — what kind of safeguards would be needed to make sure they’re around to honour a 20-year service contract? And if they do go bust, would occupants fi nd the receivers knocking on the door to reclaim parts of the building? But fi rst there are a whole host of
practical and technical challenges to be overcome, to create buildings that can be dismantled and reused, without compromising on their lifetime
“An awful lot of this is to do with ownership. If somebody’s designing something with a brick, who owns it?” Jane Thornback, Construction Products Association
22 | SEPTEMBER 2014 | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER
Brummen Town Hall in the Netherlands has a 20-year service life and is described by BAM as a “semi-circular” building. The client pays for elements such as lighting in a performance contract
performance or stability. “Designers need to start thinking about the lifecycle of a product, focusing on dismantling and reuse,” says Philippa Stone, group head of sustainability at ISG. “For example, products that are glued are notoriously hard to recycle so we need to think about how we put things together. At the moment, the focus tends to be on cost, waste and carbon effi ciency during the life cycle and not really at the end of life.” This is already being tackled. In 2013, the BSI issued part 1 of a new British Standard, BS 8895, Designing for material effi ciency in building projects, with part 2 due in early 2015, and parts 3 and 4 to follow in 2016-17.
Construction competition This was also the thinking behind a recent competition, “New designs for a circular economy”, funded by the government’s Technology Strategy Board, which challenged designers to rethink products, components and systems to make use of resources. One of these was piloted in B&Q stores over the August bank holiday last year. For a one-off DIY job, people tend to buy the cheapest tools available, which then sit in the shed or garage gathering dust. With ProjectBox, they take home all the materials for a given job and guidance on how to complete it, as well as a set of high-quality tools. When they’ve
fi nished, they return the tools and the unused materials. The TSB is now planning a construction-
specifi c circular economy competition. “We’ve increasingly seen construction sector businesses applying to circular economy competitions,” explains Mike Pitts, lead specialist, sustainability. “I think the construction sector will be one of the pioneers in achieving the circular economy — the potential advantages are huge and the opportunities are strong.” Pitts believes that BIM will play a key supporting role by providing a detailed record of exactly what a building is made of, but also by demonstrating the choices available at design stage and their impact on whole-life costs. The TSB works on a 10-20-year timescale — the typical period that it takes to highlight an issue and work through the business challenges. Pitts expects that within 10 years, there will be many more examples of the circular economy in action. “The key challenge is demonstrating that something can work,” says Pitts. “Once that’s been done, it doesn’t take long before it becomes much more commonplace. “The businesses we’ve been talking to
have very much said that this is how 0they see it going in future. This is a new way of business evolving, there’s no two ways about that.” CM
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