Building a Circular Future
With Building a Circular Future, we want to challenge and rethink the way we use and reuse resources in the building industry, toward ultimately eliminating the concept of waste.
Today, a building truly becomes a material graveyard by the end of its life. We simply do not consider how to take a building’s superstructure apart, and we do not know how to place a value on all of the resources that get lost in the process. What if, when deconstructing, we could learn from all the precision the industry put into constructing?
In the Danish building industry, we proudly state that we recycle over 87%* of all building waste. That is a measurement of weight, not of quality or economic value. Concrete crunched into road fill, in fact, has an average value of €5 per ton**, 50 times less than that of a new concrete element. Almost all building waste today is being downcycled to the lowest value possible.
The way we demolish our buildings and deteriorate our resources seems wasteful. We believe the key to Building a Circular Future is to make reusing resources into a positive and economically viable business by bringing together the principles of design for disassembly, materials passports, and the circular economy.
