OUTLOOK In response to the issues discussed above and to meet more ambitious circularity objectives, other countries have developed innovative, accessible initiatives. Modular buildings designed to encourage repurposing, reconditioning and re-use To reduce the quantity of raw materials used to construct a building and limit the waste generated by future renovations of that building, more and more research is focusing on building reversibility34,35. A reversible building must ensure that future renovations generate little or no waste and must be easy to convert to another use, for example from commercial to residential. This practice also involves giving preference to re-usable materials wherever possible. Several reversible buildings have been constructed in recent years. In Brussels, a timber building built in 2018 for use as offices was dismantled and rebuilt in 2019 to serve as commercial premises, and it is due to be transformed into an acoustics laboratory in the near future36. Another building, a seven-storey office block in the Confluence district of Lyon, France, was designed from the start to be easily transformable into a residential block in the future. The size of the windows, the balconies and even the height of the storeys were designed with both types of use in mind, and the project took into account the planned reclassification of the nearby motorway as an urban boulevard37. At a bigger scale, Park 20|20 in Amsterdam is a circular economy business district in which the buildings are reversible and quickly and easily able to accommodate different business requirements (offices, hotels, restaurants, etc.). The buildings have been designed to be dismantlable, with each different material used logged for easy identification. Park 20|20 is currently home to the international headquarters of several major corporations, and has received a large number of enquiries about opening shops there.
Conceiving the circular economy at district level In 2015, Amsterdam was the first city in the world to evaluate the quantitative potential of the circular economy. Since then, several projects have seen the light of day, including the circular economy district of Schoonschip, completed in 2019. Located in a family-friendly residential quarter in the north of the city, close to the full range of amenities, the district is made up of floating homes built of timber and other recycled materials. Heat pumps use the water in the canal for domestic heating, and water is also heated by solar collectors and photovoltaic panels that generate electricity which is stored in batteries, with the surplus being fed into the urban grid. The water treatment system is also innovative: the grey water is channelled into the conventional system, while the sewage waste is recycled into fertiliser and used to generate biogas. Most of the dwellings also have a vegetable garden on the roof. From the start, this has been designed as a circular economy district, from construction to the end of its useful life.
IGOR USTINOV Co-founder of UHCS
Like in nature, imagine and learn to regenerate our activities to better adapt the world to the impacts of our unavoidable necessities.
36 CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
