BREEAM Circularity Technical Working Group
The evidence is clear: if we’re to stay on a net zero carbon trajectory for the lifecycle of buildings, we must change our approach to design, material selection, and use. We need to think of buildings as an evolving process. We need to change our attitude from ‘take-make-use-discard’ to ‘remake-reuse’, and design for dismantling. In other words, we need to facilitate the transition towards a “circular” built environment.
The linear economic model, in which we extract , consume and discard materials, is not sustainable. The circular economy model is a system that enables us to better manage our material impact in the environment and society, so that it is regenerated, instead of steadily degrading. In a regenerative circular model, there is no such thing as waste – everything is reused.
As an industry, we need to continue to work towards a more circular approach to building and the concept of zero waste. At every stage of the construction process, there are opportunities to optimise material cycles, reuse or recycle products, components, and buildings, and for materials to move safely and cyclically. This avoids both toxicity and waste streams, so that material resources can continue to flow around a healthy, circular economy.
The BREEAM circularity strategy consists of three key principles to a circular economy.
Although BREEAM has always pushed the sector forward and encouraged sustainable resource use through all its assessment schemes, we believe we can do more on circular design approaches, and the reuse and repurposing of buildings and materials.
BREEAM will continue to enhance and extend these requirements with clearer signposting of circularity principles and technical criteria. This acknowledges the key role sustainable frameworks play in providing solutions to improve regeneration of materials, design, and systems in the built environment.
Through BREEAM’s Circularity Technical Working Group, we have made a collaborative effort to address these gaps to enable BREEAM to support a more circular approach to the built environment.
Our principles and commitments outline the circular economy strategy that will apply across the future of BREEAM schemes. We have offered guidance on what each of those principles could involve, although in the context of a truw circular built environment, it is understood that these are all interlinked.
The intention is to enable BREEAM to provide a holistic and comprehensive strategy in construction for circular economy across projects for clients. These principles will underpin the development of all circularity assessment technical criteria moving forward.
Principle 1: Resource optimisation for circular buildings
This principle’s objective is about acknowledging that both quality sourcing and quantity reduction of raw materials brought into the built environment is critical.
It is about understanding and considering how the design of buildings and infrastructure can influence and optimise the types of materials that will be locked away in our buildings for many decades. The priority should be to reuse what’s there first and for any resources used to favour healthy environmental and social outcomes. Principle one application note: Ideally this principle should be executed as early as RIBA stage one, Preparation and Briefing, and integrated across all stakeholders.
Optimising resource use
This requires design teams to challenge design briefs from the beginning and deliver strategies on how to build less and more efficiently from a resource perspective. Early design decisions must consider opportunities to reduce the demand for building materials and ensure minimal intervention (‘do nothing’) or refurbishment over demolition (i.e., use of pre-redevelopment audits). This principle will establish a consistent way of measuring resource use (i.e., material intensities) to generate benchmarks and targets for common building types.
A building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) should validate the outcomes expected from such design decisions. Similarly, materials choices can be optimised for socio-environmental outcomes. For example, using digital tools with built-in metrics to easily support a healthy circular strategy for resource use. Optimising asset design for both material selection and disassembly is a key part of the design for circular buildings. Selection of non-toxic and regenerative materials from local sources ensures low-impact next-use cycling.
Sourcing materials responsibly and regeneratively
This is about quality - evaluating the overall extent to which healthy (non-toxic) and responsibly sourced materials are specified for the project, through a documented sustainable procurement plan.
As part of this, it is crucial to specify healthy materials first, to ensure next-use cycling, and to utilise reused, recycled, renewable materials, as well as participation in reuse schemes (i.e., reusable packaging schemes). It should incentivise design teams to undertake material selection working with manufacturers, as well as encouraging material knowledge development and sharing.
Targets for circular building material recycled and/or reused content should be established, as urban mining healthy materials from local sites is preferable to new materials if determined that they are safe (i.e., non-toxic to ensure safe materials re-use).
Principle 2: designing & enabling circular buildings
This principle’s objective is about embedding circularity in a project from a whole life cycle perspective, from strategic planning to enabling the next use for materials, through careful design decisions and material specification.
Principle 2 application note: this principle ideally should be incorporated into early RIBA stages and, at the latest, by stage 2, Concept Design.
Designing for circularity
The UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) states that design approaches should focus on maximising the use of existing materials and structures, followed by designing for material health, adaptability, flexibility, replaceability, disassembly, optimum service life, product separability, ease of maintenance and scarcities. Thoughtful design approaches should assess and determine the capacity for the circular building to accommodate for reconfiguration and disassembly (i.e., provision of installation and disassembly guides).
Commitments should include appropriate strategies for all the different circular building layers and next use scenarios with highest material value in mind. Designing for a circular future: maximising existing materials, adaptability, and flexibility for optimum service life and material value. Designing for circularity: material optimisation, reuse & emerging secondary markets are key factors to consider.
Enabling circularity
This is about enabling a more circular building by considering opportunities for material optimisation, reclamation, and reuse.
At the end of life, products, components, and materials should be recovered at the highest possible value. This means design teams avoid specifying materials and products that have no known recovery route, incentivising the servitisation and leasing of building materials and products. Further focus should be on the provision of digital information on construction products (i.e., material passports), giving easy access to material and component data facilitating reuse and recycling as well as socio-environmental metrics and financial residual values.
This also includes actively pursuing opportunities to help establish emerging secondary materials markets. This will increase the likelihood of material reuse for other circular buildings and open opportunities for material procurement.
Principle 3. circular resource management
This principle’s objective is to facilitate material flow management from ideation to construction, demolition/demounting and operation with the intention of enabling highest value re-use of materials to avoid lower value cascading and eliminate all waste.
It should also develop a comprehensive strategy for resource management of urban mining and gains from surplus materials, and a consistent way of reporting this, to develop key performance indicators and benchmarks for all building and material types.
Principle 3 application note: this principle ideally should be incorporated into early RIBA stages and, at latest by stage 3, where practicable.
Empowering material recovery and re-use
During demolition: this should include undertaking an independent pre-demolition audit, implementing careful demolition strategies, segregating materials, and conducting analysis and monitoring of resource flows to maximise reuse and reclamation toward a goal of demounting and re-using instead of demolition.
During construction: this is about incorporating measures for managing construction resources that go well above and beyond standard practice. These measures would ensure and prioritise urban mining, the reuse of surplus products and materials. It would include targets and incentives for the recovery and reuse of materials and the sharing of both excess and recovered materials and products, on local platforms and networks for reuse.
During operation: this should include an Operational Resource Management Plan with suitable and easily accessible space for segregating and storing waste for collection, recycling, and reuse.
This includes consideration for the management of resources during any excavation works, training and incentives to staff and sub-contractors to deliver materials to cycling streams instead of waste streams, by sharing both excess and recovered materials and products on local platforms and networks.
About BREEAM circularity and resilience
Circularity principles for resource use and supply chains are vital to developing a built environment tat is resource efficient. We support a future where circularity principles are fully embraced and our reliance on finite resources is significantly reduced.
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