Laying the foundation for circular buildings

By Merlijn Blok, sustainability consultant at Metabolic

Metabolic
Metabolic
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

Metabolic — together with our partners at SGS Search — has developed the world’s first roadmap for circular building tendering. Created for the city of Amsterdam, the roadmap was recently officially presented by the city to the Dutch Green Building Council as a marker of the city’s endorsement of its ideas. Here Metabolic consultant Merlijn Blok explains how this roadmap has the potential to fundamentally change the way we develop our built environment and why other cities, municipalities, housing corporations, and real estate developers should join Amsterdam in practically implementing circular tendering in new building developments.

The way we designed our built environment in the past — in everything from school and offices to homes and hospitals — served us well for decades in housing a growing population and facilitating commerce and movement. However, it is now becoming increasingly evident that our approach has locked us into patterns of substantial and damaging social and environmental impact.

Globally, the built environment is responsible for an estimated 60% of material use. In the Netherlands, buildings are responsible for 40% of everyday energy use and 25% of CO2 emissions.

Construction and demolition activities in the Netherlands additionally account for 24 million tonnes of waste production, which is almost equivalent to industrial and consumer waste combined. And although 94% of this waste is currently recycled, this mostly occurs in downgraded form (such as debris for road construction).

A built environment that applies the principles of the circular economy is called for. But how do you practically transition the design and development of buildings so they not only mitigate against these impactful issues, but so that they also provide value and efficiently embed materials in long-term cycles? Many municipalities, cities and housing corporations struggle with this question. The answer is, as expected, not simple and even raises additional questions such as: How do we define a circular building? What are effective leverage points for accelerating this transition? And, crucially, what initial steps do we need to take to initiate this process?

At Metabolic, we have come up with an answer to this challenge. Through our work with SGS Search for the municipality of Amsterdam, this year we started practically implementing circularity in the built environment of the city of Amsterdam. Together, we developed a framework for circular building that defines and measures the circularity of a building, and provides criteria which may be used by municipalities and housing corporations to score buildings on their circularity performance. The circularity score of the building is based on Metabolic’s seven pillars of a circular economy to ensure an integral approach. The goals in these seven pillars are then defined through our four decision-making principles: reduce, synergize, supply, and smart management. By integrating these criteria in tender processes, circular innovation in housing development can be rewarded, and the transition to a more circular building sector can be stimulated. This way we aim to set a standard for circular buildings, to which all new stock will directly contribute.

In the development of the guidelines for circular tendering we have been working closely with both the municipality of Amsterdam and the market parties responsible for designing and constructing residential buildings. The criteria are performance based; leaving the question of how to most effectively reach a good sustainability and circularity performance to the market. By rewarding performance rather than means, we provoke innovation rather than confining it. We also limit the administrative burden and potentially costly procedures on both sides, by avoiding detailed designs or resource intensive evaluation processes. This ensures that both sides of the tender are incentivized to achieve ambitious circular performance. And by measuring this performance afterwards, each of these tenders will additionally yield valuable benchmarks for the circular performance of a building, which continually stimulates the market to perform better.

The most exciting part of this project is that we will initiate at least three circular tenders in Amsterdam, in which we put our guidelines into practice and circular buildings will be realized. In this way we will demonstrate the city’s ambition towards a circular built environment and the effectiveness of the roadmap developed by Metabolic and SGS Search to get there.

Although this project focuses on housing development in the city of Amsterdam, the roadmap we developed is flexible enough to be tailored to a broad range of building types and locations. This means it is scalable to many other cities in the Netherlands, and that is exactly the type of scale-up we are hoping to achieve: we are actively seeking opportunities to take this across the Netherlands to maximize its potential and impact. So if you are in the position of realizing housing and building projects and you share our vision of a circular built environment, then get in touch: we’d like to talk about how we can realize our shared vision.

To read the report find it online here (in Dutch).

Metabolic

Written by

Metabolic

Solving global sustainability challenges through systems thinking, venture building and empowering changemakers. www.metabolic.nl

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