Circular construction: working together, the key to success

Cooperatives around circular materials and systems offer great added value

Circular innovation is hard to find in the construction world: implementers and investors prefer to avoid risks associated with new building techniques and often fall back on traditional building solutions. In addition, the individual interests of the various building disciplines are predominantly taken as a starting point, resulting in little trust between different actors within a (re)construction project. Therefore, it is not always clear what individual and social opportunities circular building has to offer. 

Through this project, Jansen by ODS, Bureau Bouwtechniek, Lootens, BUURMAN Antwerp and Franck want to change this. Thus, we first thoroughly studied the various opportunities (joint business, more reuse, temporary storage, cooperation between materials hubs ...) and bottlenecks (low efficiency of selective demolition, poor available information of used components, complex logistical planning ...) of such cooperation. 

The cooperative is supported by three different materials hubs: the Circular Steel hub led by Jansen by ODS and Lootens, the materials hall with wood products by BUURMAN and the facing brick site by Franck. 

We worked on several cases to test the process of urban mining, the digital and logistics aspects, the harvest map and the repurposing of the secondary materials cycle.

What will the future bring? 

Our report shows opportunities, obstacles and possible solutions. Collaboration on circular building materials and systems is a great ambition and a continuous process of learning, testing and reflecting. 

Today, two partners are considering the follow-up and the feedback on their plans is already hopeful. 

Through the Harvest Bay Foundation, we want to safeguard the knowledge that was gained. It is very diverse and transcends everyone's specialism, and also offers room for biobased solutions. The new projects are already presenting themselves, so we can in fact already start. The idea is to set up a cooperative company for this purpose, initially as a start-up, in which recently graduated architecture and commercial science students will also have a role. The necessary funding for this is currently being worked out. It is already clear that the supporting digital platform will be complex to scale up, and will also involve the necessary costs.