Construction industry needs circular economy for sustainable future

It's like Monopoly – but everyone is losing. The industry must shift its emphasis beyond recycling and towards reuse
monopoly board game
'We're playing a game of monopoly where everyone is losing ... People can't afford the homes they want, builders can't afford to deliver the quality of buildings we want.' Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

When the founder of building waste reuse business Yooz was offered a 10,000 tonne steel roof from the London Olympics for a large sports centre for disabled people, he thought it might be his lucky day. "The roof would have been so ideal for the centre," said Ian Strachan. "But we were building it near Glasgow and the logistics of getting it to us were impossible. It was cheaper to buy a new one in the end."

The predicament highlights the unsustainable nature of the facilities management and property sector he says, where properties are rarely built to last or be reused. The construction and demolition sector is the largest contributor to waste in the UK, responsible for generating 120m tonnes every year, according to the Green Building Council.

"When new stuff is being built like this, especially when it's only for a 12-day event and it's going to be deconstructed soon after, there really needs to be more thought about what will happen to those materials," said Strachan, who spoke at this month's Resource event "releasing the opportunities of the circular economy" in London. He is expecting a similar situation to arise after Glasgow's Commonwealth Games this summer, and added: "A lot needs to be learned around major investments like this."

Fellow speakers at the event said the sustainability agenda in construction had increasingly gravitated towards recycling, when it should be focused on reuse. There were calls for more information and records on materials used in buildings to enable them to be more easily reused, as well as more modular buildings.

"So much energy and effort goes into crushing up concrete and then cementing or gluing it back together," said Graham Hilton, director of the Alliance for Sustainable Building. "It takes a huge amount of energy and uses more virgin materials. Things need to be made so that they are bolted together and then taken apart for reuse."

Dan Epstein, senior director at sustainable design organisation Useful Simple Trust, added: "There are so many products that we don't know what do with after a certain amount of time, we need to be thinking about these things from the beginning – assembly for disassembly."

"Lessons could be learned from the car industry," said Hilton. "Cars look completely different but underneath the modular design is the same, it's easy to replace components rather than just scrap the whole car when something goes wrong. What we need in the building industry is one way to put things together and take them apart. We need a Tesco room to be able to fit into an M&S room – they can still look different."

Panellists in the session entitled "closed loop in action in facilities management and property construction" were concerned about about the future of the construction and property sector if more effort wasn't made to record data on materials used, design out unreusable materials and create markets for previously used materials.

"We're playing a game of monopoly where everyone is losing," said Hilton. "People can't afford the homes they want, builders can't afford to deliver the quality of buildings we want; there's a huge gap in what's designed and what's delivered. Buildings don't last as long as they should and banks don't feel confident enough to secure loans against them.

"Let's start using better designed reusable components from the start, so we can take a bite out of the huge amount of waste that comes from this sector. There is a slightly higher front-end cost, but the cost benefits work out very well in the long run," he said.
