Published in most francophone media, here is An even more useful Earth Day? by Michel Gourd. For all intents and purposes, Earth Day is not only an initiative to raise sustainability awareness, but as elaborated here, it covers all aspects of life for everyone all around the earth.
As Published by Sam Pattisapu on Earth Day 2024 is an annual commemoration that was conceived and launched in 1970 by Democratic U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and Republican U.S. Representative Pete McCloskey of California. The website provides a powerful reminder of the similarities between the two times and the differences in the environmental challenges faced by the present generation.
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SENE NEWS Par El Malick Faye
22 April 2024
Although it already shows that the world’s population is ready to take action to improve the planet, Earth Day could spark more positive actions to reduce environmental debt and the use of fossil fuels, COP29’s blind spot.
Globally, April 22 marks Earth Day. First held in 1970, it has become a symbol of awareness of the environmental challenges facing our planet on a global scale. It’s a powerful tool for the environment. Around one billion people from 190 countries are taking part this year under the theme of sustainable mobility and environmentally responsible travel. These gestures of responsible citizens who take local action can also be seen with the urgency of protecting the Earth that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pleaded for in July 2023, “The era of global warming is over; make way for the era of global boiling” he said at the time.
Overshoot Day
Each of us is part of a collective that consumes a little more each year than the Earth can produce. The day of the exceedance of the renewable resources produced by our planet calculated by the “Global Footprint Network” from three million statistical data collected from 200 countries was December 31 in, 1986, October 9 in, 2006, August 3 in, 2016 and August 2 in, 2023. This date varies greatly from country to country. If it arrives as soon as February 11 for Qatar in 2024, it is November 24 in Ecuador and Indonesia but does not exceed June 3 for Western countries.
We are currently consuming more than 1.7 times the available renewable resources and, therefore, the environmental capital that will be missing for future generations. Overshoot Day is one of the best symbols of human overconsumption and the need to reduce it to protect the Earth’s ecosystems. It can no longer sustainably support our production and consumption patterns. Therefore, we must collectively have the intelligence to reduce our lifestyle and adapt it to the maximum budget our planet gives us.
COP29 and Earth
Climate finance will be at the heart of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Its chairman, Mukhtar Babayev, who is the host country’s Minister of Natural Resources, has so far responded little to the concerns of the protectors of the Earth. Instead, since the beginning of the year, it has been posting meetings with banks, countries and investment tools to secure the financial side of the event. His country has officially announced that it will increase its natural gas production by 35% by 2034. It thus abandons, as did the leaders of COP28, a major recommendation of the IPCC, namely that not all new fossil fuel discoveries should be developed.
2024 was the hottest year on record on the planet. The lack of interest in limiting the use of fossil fuels over the past 40 years is already producing extreme heat waves, leading to diseases such as cholera, malnutrition, habitat destruction, deteriorating living conditions, social inequalities, forced migration, and wars. Any citizen involvement in reducing the use of fossil fuels can only be positive.
An Earth Day that lasts all year round?
According to the latest annual United in Science 2021 climate report by UN scientists, climate change and its consequences are getting worse. Antonio Guterres said, “We really don’t have any more time to lose.”
In the face of self-serving inertia on the part of many large corporations and governments, the concrete citizen action promoted by Earth Day could be a voice for action. Citizens who want to take action to protect the planet can take millions of small, concrete actions that meet their daily needs and aspirations while respecting their environment, whether economic, social or physical, in the long term.
Thinking before you buy or destroy the environment is becoming more and more important. Reducing consumption is also compatible with happiness. According to Amélie Côté, a source reduction analyst at Équiterre, reducing work hours is not necessarily a deprivation since it allows you to have more time with your family and friends and often only requires you to be more sober in your consumption choices.
“Time is a very precious commodity.” Spending time working to buy things that don’t make you happier is not an optimal way to live. Living more responsibly for the environment, as Earth Day does, requires respecting our planet’s resources and boundaries.
A new first-ot-its-kind green cement plant in Redding, California, has 70% lower emissions than conventional cement production. Fortera, CC BY-ND
Aside from water, concrete is the most-used material in the world, with about 14 billion cubic metres being used every year. Of that, 40% of that is used to build places for people to live.
If you were to pour that amount of concrete to make a paving slab ten centimetres thick, it would cover all of England and about half of Wales. In the US, the same amount would cover the state of New York.
But concrete production releases carbon dioxide (CO₂), one of the greenhouse gases that drives climate change. About 90% of emissions associated with concrete come from the production of Portland cement – this fine grey powder, the part that binds concrete ingredients together, was named after its resemblence to stone from the Isle of Portland, Dorset. Portland cement accounts for 7%-8% of the world’s direct CO₂ emissions.
Production of a more sustainable and cost-effective low-carbon cement, often nicknamed “green” cement, is scaling up. A new plant next to an existing cement plant in Redding, California, will produce about 15,000 tonnes of low-carbon cement every year. This could be used to make about 50,000 cubic metres of concrete, which is less than 0.0004% of the world’s concrete production.
At Redding, materials technology company Fortera turns CO₂ captured during conventional cement production into ready-to-use green cement, a form of calcium carbonate. This could reduce carbon emissions of cement by 70% on a tonne-for-tonne basis, according to Fortera.
A concrete issue
People have been using concrete for more than 2,000 years, by blending gravel, sand, cement, water and, sometimes, synthetic chemicals. It’s used to create everything from paths and bridges to buildings and pipes.
Cement production is an energy-intensive process and the greenhouse gas emissions are hard to cut. When limestone is heated in a kiln, often fuelled by coal, nearly half that limestone is lost as CO₂ emissions.
This happens because limestone (calcium carbonate) breaks down in heat to form clinker, a mix of calcium oxide and CO₂. For every tonne of ordinary Portland cement made, 0.6-0.9 tonnes of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere.
So many industries rely on this material. The main challenge facing the cement industry is reducing CO₂ emissions at the same time as meeting global demand.
So as well as developing new technologies, low-carbon cement production must be established on a global scale to meet infrastructural needs required of economically developing nations.
Low-carbon alternatives
Other ways to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete include using fly ash (a by-product from burning coal in power plants) or slag (a by-product from steel production) to partially replace Portland cement.
However, sources of these materials will reduce as other industries decarbonise. Over time, less iron ore will be used to produce steel as more steel is produced from recycling existing steel, so there’ll be less available slag.
Current strategies for decarbonising cement and concrete rely heavily on using carbon capture and storage technology to capture unavoidable process emissions from cement plants.
So low-carbon cement production doesn’t have to involve replacing every cement production plant in operation. Low-carbon cement facilities can be retrofitted to capture CO₂ emissions released from manufacturing conventional cement. Plants can also use that captured CO₂ within the cement that they are producing or as a product for the food and chemical industries.
In Norway, Heidelberg Materials are building an industrial-scale carbon capture and storage plant at a cement facility that could capture and store an estimated 400,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year – that’s half the existing plant’s emissions.
Greenhouse gas emissions in the cement sector are regulated by the EU’s emissions trading system. This was established to make polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions, reduce emissions and generate revenues to finance the green transition.
This legislation has not significantly reduced carbon emissions in the cement sector over the past decade, according to the International Energy Agency, mainly due to free emissions allowances being granted to cement manufacturers.
Despite sustained healthy profits in the cement industry, there hasn’t been enough investment in the widespread uptake of cleaner technologies and the sustainable use of materials. Greater financial incentives could help whereby companies have to pay for emissions associated with the production of cement.
Fortera is the only company directly capturing carbon emissions from cement production to make a pure low-carbon cement binder like this. Fortera, CC BY-ND
As a design engineer, I appreciate that material choice and good design play a major role in the sustainability credentials of construction. Before low-carbon cement technology becomes more widespread, engineers, designers and builders can use construction materials more efficiently and choose products with lower embodied carbon – that’s carbon emissions released during the life cycle of building materials, from extraction through to disposal.
This approach could easily save 20% in embodied emissions associated with new building design.
Some governments could move towards only permitting the use of low-carbon cement. In Ireland, the Climate Action Plan 2024 requires that low-carbon construction methods and low-carbon cement are specified where possible for government-procured or government-supported construction projects.
Could all cement in the future be low-carbon or “green”? How “low-carbon” is defined will play a very important part in how this is translated into practice in the industry.
Retrofitting technology to large-scale existing cement production plants will prove that it’s technically possible to produce low-carbon cement efficiently at scale. With the right incentives in place by governments and the construction sector, almost all cement produced around the world could be low-carbon.
The gradual abandonment of fossil fuels in national energy mixes in favour of new clean energies has now been agreed upon internationally. It should lead to the establishment of a new energy ecosystem. This historic decision, adopted at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), held in Dubai from 30 November to 12 December 2023, has a double effect:
(1) accelerate efforts to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 or around 2050 through a phase-down of coal use, the elimination of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies and the significant reduction of methane emissions; and (2) accelerate the global economy’s transition to renewable energy sources, cleaner technologies, and greater energy efficiency. While these measures have become essential to deal with global warming, the energy transition will impose costs on fossil fuel-producing and exporting countries and force them to set up new diversified economic models. These costs will vary from one oil-producing country to another depending on their specificities in terms of products exported and the structure of extraction costs. As far as it is concerned, although oil has dominated economic activity since independence, Algeria does not contribute significantly to global climate change.
However, like other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, it remains strongly affected by various serious natural disturbances. In addition to the structural costs imposed by the latter (ecosystems, infrastructure, economic activity), there will be those of the energy transition. The combination of the two will inevitably increase the country’s macroeconomic and social vulnerabilities as well as the financial need to address them. The future must therefore be prepared now by putting in place ambitious and coherent macroeconomic reforms and mobilizing adequate financing to create new engines of growth. An immediate strategic priority. Let’s discuss these points.
The energy transition is expected to reconfigure the structure of the market for energy products. The current global energy mix is dominated by fossil fuels (85% with oil accounting for 34% of global energy consumption, gas 23% and coal 28%). Although increasing, the share of renewable energies (wind, solar and geothermal) is only 15%. The five largest producers of renewable energy are China (31% of global production), the United States (11%), Brazil (6.4%), Canada (5.4%) and India (3.9%). Iceland is the country with 87% of its energy produced from renewable sources, followed by Norway (71.56%) and Sweden (50.92%). In 2023, the global renewable energy sector employed 14 million people and attracted $525 billion in investment.
Fossil fuel exporters will now face a gradual decline in global demand between 2024-2050. In support of net-zero GHG emissions, projections by the International Energy Agency, the World Bank and the IMF show a decline in the consumption of coal (90% due to its high carbon content), oil (80%) and natural gas (70% due to its low carbon content). Demand for natural gas could even increase in the short to medium term if it is used as a transition fuel as a substitute for coal.
The impacts on domestic demand for fossil fuels will not be uniform but will depend on a range of factors, including: (1) the type of product exported and its extraction costs; (2) the specificities of the country; (3) the dynamics of fossil fuel sector reform (downstream carbon pricing, adoption of clean technologies, penalization of emissions-intensive extraction processes, and banning polluting technologies); (4) the level of investment in fossil fuel projects, particularly by major crude oil, natural gas or coal producing countries so as not to undermine global energy security; (5) technological development in favour of cleaner energy alternatives; and (6) freezing 60% of the world’s proven oil and natural gas reserves and 90% of coal reserves to meet the COP 28 target.
The energy transition will have an impact on the macroeconomic fundamentals of fossil fuel exporting countries.
The sustainability of the balance of payments will be threatened by a decline in net fossil fuel export earnings, a decline in foreign direct investment in the energy sector, an increase in the country’s external debt, a decline in foreign exchange reserves, a depreciation of the nominal exchange rate, and a consequent rise in inflation.
Economic growth and, ultimately, its main drivers. The decline in exports and/or investment associated with the oil industry will first weaken economic activity and employment in the downstream sectors (cement, fertilizers, petrochemicals, steel). Secondly, there will be multiplier effects on the economy as a whole, through reductions in employment levels, incomes of economic agents, oil taxation, private and public consumption and investment. Finally, changes in domestic demand, fossil fuel consumer prices, and exchange rate movements will fuel inflationary pressures.
The sustainability of public finances. The variation in global fossil fuel prices will reduce the level of taxation collected from public and private companies (national and international) involved in this activity (taxes, dividends, royalties and profits in the case of production-sharing contracts). The spillover effects on the economy as a whole will also take the form of a reduction in the tax base, a change in the structure of public expenditure (conversion and restructuring programmes of the economy) and an increase in the debt of state-owned enterprises (through explicit and implicit public guarantees). Ultimately, governments will need to draw on their reserves or cut spending to maintain the sustainability of public finances and public debt.
The banking and financial sector: which is heavily involved in the financing of the fossil fuel industry, could face higher risks related to balance sheet effects (generated by exchange rate fluctuations, excessive volatility or sustained changes in fossil fuel sales), which will affect the ability of the financial sector to attract domestic or international financing and to ensure the intermediation of funds and the support for the economy.
The main thrusts of reforms at the level of fossil fuel exporting countries to manage the energy transition. Overall, the latter is a source of challenges but also opportunities for the countries concerned to undertake a transition to an energy mix that will protect populations and ensure sustainable economic development. In the context of long-term planning, punctuated by regular assessments to determine the point of abandonment of fossil fuel investments and the shift to clean energy, countries should put in place appropriate public policies and reforms based on the following key areas:
Diversification of the economy: to reduce their dependence on fossil fuel revenues by targeting the renewable energy, tourism, agriculture, manufacturing and knowledge sectors.
Investments in renewable energy: to meet their energy needs and reduce carbon emissions while paving the way for new economic opportunities and jobs.
Tax reforms: aimed at reducing the share of taxation on fossil fuels through new taxes or levies on the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, as well as the reallocation of public spending towards sustainable development.
Social safety nets: vital to help vulnerable populations adapt to a changing economy, including through support programs for workers exiting the fossil fuel sector and subsidies to promote access to renewable energy.
Institutional framework for renewable energy: To facilitate the emergence and consolidation of renewable energy, complementary reforms will target governance, transparency and regulatory frameworks.
The case of Algeria: meeting the dual challenge of climate change and a costly and complex energy transition. The latter must be prepared now to absorb its costs over a longer period and create new growth engines. Three points to highlight.
Climate change is already a source of structural damage: in recent years, it has manifested itself through a series of shocks, including rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, heat or cold waves, droughts and floods. These shocks will continue to impact the country over the next few years, particularly in the most vulnerable sectors such as agriculture (crops and livestock), forests (fires and forest dieback), hydraulics in ecosystems north of the Sahara and health (vulnerability to many pathologies).
The main thrusts of the national strategy to combat climate change: according to the Ministry of the Environment and Renewable Energies, revolve around:
(1) the development of renewable energies by exploiting the significant potential of solar and wind energy; (2) adaptation to the challenges of water scarcity and desertification through investments in water management, agriculture and infrastructure resilience; (3) strengthening public policies and regulations: to support climate change objectives (stricter emission standards, incentives for renewable energy projects and sustainable land use practices); (4) continued international collaboration to facilitate the sharing of best practices, access to finance for climate projects, and participation in global climate negotiations; and (5) public awareness and education to foster public support for mitigation and adaptation efforts.
The strategy for managing the energy transition: in 2023, fossil fuels contributed 19.1% to gross domestic product (GDP), 91.3% to exports and 52% to total budget revenues. Algeria is ranked 54th in the 2024 Climate Change Performance Index. Taken together, these two elements underscore the extent of future efforts to decarbonize and diversify the national economy, especially as energy experts estimate that the country’s oil production is expected to peak in 2040 (this could vary depending on future economic trends, technological developments, and the efforts of companies and governments to mitigate climate change).
It is therefore vital that Algeria, like other fossil fuel-producing countries, accelerate economic diversification and make it a strategic priority. In the meantime, the ongoing global energy transition will add to long-standing uncertainties about the relative movements of fossil fuel demand and supply and will negatively impact fossil fuel-related exports, tax flows, investment and, consequently, external and fiscal accounts, economic growth and employment.
To address these challenges and move towards diversification, Algeria will need to step up its efforts to mitigate fiscal risks. In addition, fiscal policy should contribute to a reduction in national GHG emissions, by promoting the uptake of low-carbon technologies and helping the most vulnerable to cope with changes related to the energy transition.
In terms of broader macroeconomic risks, the authorities should address them by accelerating structural reforms targeting the emergence of new growth drivers. At the same time, improved regulation and financial supervision could limit financial sector exposures.
Finally, continued international coordination on the design and implementation of new climate policies as well as international transfer programmes (financing and capacity development) offer appropriate ways to address the uncertainties surrounding the energy transition and the associated negative economic consequences.
Only 57 producers are responsible for 80% of all fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions as claimed in its Launch Report on the current Carbon Majors Database.
The image above is for illustration purposes – credit Yahoo
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Only 57 producers are responsible for 80% of all fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions since 2016 – new report
Just 57 companies and nation-states were responsible for generating 80% of the world’s CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the last seven years, according to a new report released by the thinktank InfluenceMap. This finding suggests that net zero targets set by the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015 are yet to make a significant impact on fossil fuel production.
The report uses the Carbon Majors database, established in 2013 by Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, to provide fossil fuel production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers.
The InfluenceMap report tells a sobering but informative story of the state of production in these high-emitting industries. Cement and fossil fuel production has reached unprecedented levels, with most of the emission growth traceable to a relatively small number of large companies.
The troubling reality is that the lack of progress of these large fossil fuel companies means the world will need to undertake ever more stringent and steep decarbonisation trajectories if countries are to meet the Paris agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2°C.
The Carbon Majors database highlights how critical it is for companies and countries to be held accountable for their lack of progress on emission reductions. Companies need to define exactly how best to align with the Paris goals, and then monitor and track their progress.
To address this need, our team of researchers from the Universities of Queensland, Oxford and Princeton developed a framework that outlines strict science-based requirements for tracking the progress of companies against Paris-aligned pathways.
By applying this framework to the Carbon Majors database in a follow-up study, our team mapped production budgets for 142 fossil fuel companies against several Paris-aligned global scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
We considered the “middle-of-the-road” future scenario whereby business carries on as usual – this is commonly used by investors to evaluate a company’s climate risks. With this scenario, we found that between 2014 and 2020, the coal, oil and gas companies produced 64%, 63% and 70% respectively more than their budgets allow. Further details can be found on the Are You Paris Compliant? website.
Transparency is crucial
Over the seven-year period covered by the InfluenceMap report, nation states and state-owned companies are responsible for most of this growth. It is not yet clear whether such government-run companies will move towards improved reporting against climate standards, but further interventions by governments will clearly be required to meet stated national emission-reduction goals.
Fortunately, more transparency will be available for investor-owned companies. In 2023, a non-profit that aims to standardise global accounting, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, released new climate-related disclosure standards. These should provide investors, politicians and the public with access to more transparent and consistent data, making it much easier for them to accurately judge companies’ climate performance – or lack thereof.
It will be interesting to read the climate reporting of the 57 companies identified by InfluenceMap in coming years. The release of the Carbon Majors data, along with the new climate-related disclosure standards, will hopefully make a huge difference. Companies being more accountable for their emissions should help reduce greenwashing in corporate sustainability reports.
Quantifying fossil fuel and cement production, and associated emissions, is a crucial step. But companies also need to act. Achieving net zero by reducing the emissions of a relatively small number of companies will be much easier than persuading 8 billion people to take collective action on climate.
Such drastic reductions in fossil fuel production must also be matched by investment in abundant and increasingly cheap sources of clean renewable energy. Without these steps, the Paris goals will be unachievable – and that’s very risky for all of us.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
“Reuse and recycle” is a catchphrase most people associate with plastic bags or bottles. But our homes, schools and offices are also made with materials that are far too valuable and carbon-intensive for single use: They shouldn’t always be produced anew and then thrown away when buildings get demolished. Applying circular economy principles to construction – keeping materials in use for as long as possible, then reuse them in the next project or recycle them – holds great promise for greening our buildings. To ensure this approach takes off in earnest, regulators need to play catch-up, and project developers must ditch old habits.
***Please note: This article is part of a series on the climate and environmental impact of construction, published in collaboration with FORESIGHT Climate and Energy. You can find the full series here.***
The CRCLR House in Berlin looks almost unfinished even though it was completed in 2022. There is no paint on the walls, which are a mix of timber, clay, hemp and what was left from the brewery that once stood there. Every joint is visible, as is the wiring running along the walls.
The idea behind the project: when, decades down the line, the time comes for the space to be changed to serve a different purpose, the building can be taken apart like a LEGO house, with the individual components retaining their original form and quality, ready to be used again.
As the name suggests, the co-working space was built following circularity principles. Around 70 percent of its materials were produced sustainably or were previously used elsewhere: from the bathroom sinks reclaimed from a camping site and timber from an art installation now converted into meeting booths to windows and fire safety doors.
“Form followed availability,” commented Felix Hauerken from Impact Hub, the organisation providing the co-working spaces. Construction started before the building plan was fully finalised, and the design was adapted as materials from demolition sites or carpentry workshops became available.
Where reclaimed or “waste” materials were not available, the project developers used low-carbon ones. Above the shared offices, the architects added affordable flats. The new stories are made out of timber and insulated with straw – all materials screwed or wedged to make their eventual deconstruction as smooth as possible.
The CRCLR House in Berlin, a former brewery, was refurbished using 70 percent upcycled, recycled or sustainable materials. Photo: Michael Berger.
Finite resources, yet a mountain of waste
About half of the raw materials extracted in Europe every year end up in buildings and roads. Yet, these resources are finite: There are more materials now embedded in buildings and infrastructure than are easily accessible in the earth, said Rebekka Steinlein, architect and business development manager at Concular, a circular construction business.
Construction and renovation sites alone also generate over a third of the waste that ends up in Europe’s landfills. Globally, 13 percent of materials delivered to construction sites are sent directly to landfill without being used at all, according to the World Green Building Council (WGBC).
The current linear system does not work and needs to change.
Peter Vangsbo, circular cities lead at ARUP, a global planning and design company
Beyond finite resources and mountains of waste, there is the question of emissions. The EUestimates that greenhouse gas emissions from material extraction, manufacturing of construction products, and the construction and renovation of buildings account for 5 to 12 percent of total member states’ emissions. As a result, the bloc’s building stock has emerged as a key obstacle to reaching the EU’s goal of climate neutrality by 2050, enshrined as a legal obligation in its Climate Law.
Less is more
A circular approach, which disconnects economic activity from the ever-increasing consumption of natural resources, has emerged as a key strategy to overcome this dilemma. Circularity recognises the value of used materials by keeping them in supply chains, rather than discard them into landfill. Applying these principles to buildings means constructing houses with reclaimed, low or zero-carbon materials in such a way that they can be recovered and reused in future projects.
There is a hierarchy to circularity beyond the idea of keeping materials and components in “infinite” use cycles. It prioritises prolonging the value of buildings for as long as possible, followed by reusing their materials, rebuilding old ones to be as good as new – a process known as remanufacturing – and recycling or downcycling as a last resort, followed ultimately by incineration or disposal.
The CampusRO, a student accommodation facility, used the majority of the materials of a warehouse formerly located on site instead of removing the demolition material and having new materials delivered. Photo: PMA Invest.
However, “designing efficiently often gets left out of the circularity discussion,” said Danielle Densley Tingley, a senior lecturer in architectural engineering at the University of Sheffield. Construction projects often use more materials than needed. For example, it is often possible to retain the same structural strength with only 50 to 60 percent of the cement used today. This alone has the potential to save 1 billion tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050, according to a 2023 report.
Indeed, shifting to a circular built environment could reduce global carbon emissions from building materials by 38 percent by 2050, thanks to reduced demand for new steel, aluminium, cement and plastic, a 2019 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found.
“The most sustainable building is the one you don’t build”
Circularity first and foremost encourages extending the lifespan of existing buildings. “The most sustainable building is the one you don’t build,” said Sheffield University’s Densley Tingley. “Changing our attitudes and massively increasing re-use of buildings within Europe is probably going to be the single most effective way of reducing carbon.”
Her views were echoed by her Sheffield University colleague Dr Charles Gillott, a construction expert. “We need to dramatically prioritise retention of existing buildings over demolitions and deconstruction,” he said. “There is huge circular potential within the existing building stock as it currently stands.”
“You could build the most circular or lowest carbon building possible, but if you demolished something that was in its place in order to be able to do so, that isn’t actually a good thing overall,” he added.
Prolonging the lifetime of existing buildings has the potential to reduce emissions by an additional 1 billion tonnes of CO2 per year beyond 2050. Repurposing existing buildings – opening office canteens as restaurants in the evening, or converting unused office space (which has grown in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic) – is one way to achieve this, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA), an EU advisory body.
What are our buildings made of, exactly?
If the materials embedded in buildings are to be reused, we need to know what, and where, they are. This is a huge challenge for circularity today: With very few exceptions, we simply do not know what the walls around us and the floor we’re standing on are made from.
Poor design and lack of information mean that, globally, only 20 to 30 percent of construction and demolition waste is recycled or reused.
While the concept of urban mining has picked up – the notion of finding, extracting, reusing or recycling materials already built into urban areas – there is still no requirement to either assess the re-usability potential of materials inside of buildings being demolished today, or to document what materials go into new buildings or refurbishment projects.
“Even nowadays, when we build, we do not document it,” said Dominik Campanella, one of Concular’s co-founders. “There’s no digitalisation, meaning that after one year, for most buildings the whole documentation no longer exists.”
Digital tools like Building Information Models (BIM) and so-called resource passports are bridging this gap, especially in the Nordic countries. The former are “digital twins” of buildings, serving as a central database during a building’s entire lifecycle, while the latter register essential information about the product they belong to (composition, origin of resources, global warming potential, quality, deconstructability), enabling comparison between materials, and meaning resources can be used by multiple actors across different value chains.
Business as usual not an option
Despite EU efforts to boost circularity across the bloc, progress is slow. A recent EEA report pours cold water on the notion that Europe has widely embraced circular economy principles: “Europe continues to operate under a predominantly linear model, where products placed on the market tend to have a relatively short use phase,” it states. “Business models primarily revolve around mass-producing products, often sacrificing quality, and this results in early breakdown or premature obsolescence.”
Indeed, a 2023 report identified a lack of attractive circular business models as one of the primary barriers to greater circularity. This is particularly true for buildings: Their long lifespan means that a share of the profits of building in a circular way will only pay off decades down the line.
The market for material recovery – current demolitions – can also be challenging: 85 percent of Europe’s buildings were erected over 20 years ago, meaning they might contain toxic materials, such as asbestos. Many materials are glued together rather than bolted, making it hard to separate and salvage them.
Still, there is tremendous economic as well as ecological value embedded in salvaged materials. But many project developers are oblivious of this and are stuck in their habits. A change in business models is needed if circular economy approaches are to be adopted at scale, according to ARUP’s Vangsbo.
“Circular economy needs to be viewed as a business strategy, not just a waste management or a design strategy,” he said. “If a critical mass of investors and construction clients embraces this message, we are confident the real estate sector can deliver significant returns, while reducing its negative burden on the planet.”
For those used to the status quo, adopting a new production mindset can be difficult. But doing so is a necessity if companies want to become fit for a climate neutral future, said Lars Autrup, CEO of the Danish Architects Association.
“Business as usual is not a solution. Unfortunately, far too many businesses are extremely conservative and will fight against any form of change,” he added.
Regulators play catch-up
Autrup argued that government policy should be used to shift the construction sector towards circularity, including taxes on carbon emissions, life-cycle assessment requirements, and the use of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to ensure long-lasting materials are favoured.
In doing so, we can achieve a Europe-wide shift, where our built environment is seen as “a resource to be reused at its highest level of conservation,” Autrup said. In other words: viewing buildings as valuable “material banks“, instead of single-use structures.
“It’s good to have something in place, but if we really want to tackle climate change then the measures are not enough,” Concular’s Campanella said, explaining that most regulations still focus on virgin materials – a minimum quota of recycled materials in production, for example – but not much exists for reclaimed materials themselves.
“Regulation is the key. But having a way to measure circularity in buildings is also important,” Campanella added. While thecircular performance index is a recognised industry standard, giving buildings a score up to 100, what counts as circular is measured differently across the EU.
Reporting on circularity and circularity-related environmental topics is difficult, as frameworks and benchmarks don’t always exist or align.
More than half of new buildings in Europe meet less than 50 percent of the requirements of a circular economy, according to a 2023 report by the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB). The authors found that even projects prioritising circularity struggled to meet quotas for reused or recycled materials.
Circular economy in the built environment is still in its infancy, with much of the information and social infrastructure still missing. Willing project developers often find it difficult to source second-hand materials in large volumes, store them until required, and ensure that the reclaimed materials meet safety and quality standards.
There are companies bridging these gaps by connecting supply and demand, but they are few and far between. Still, “there is no reason not to do it,” argued Concular’s Campanella. With over 400 examples, his company has shown that building with reclaimed materials is economically possible, faster, of equal quality (achieved through product re-certifications), and that volumes exist.
Changing supply chains
Thinking about circularity’s potential and trade-offs holistically, systemically and across policy domains is needed to make the most of the economic model.
As the world decarbonises, supply chains change: while, for example, fewer demolitions are ultimately a positive development, the fact would also result in fewer reclaimed materials being available for new projects. Germany’s coal phase-out will have a big impact on the domestic supply of gypsum, the main constituent in plasterboard and a widely used construction material that is mainly derived from the plant’s exhaust gases.
“We have to think about those interplays and knock-on effects, and how they operate within the wider system,” Sheffield University’s Gillott said. “As much as it is about getting the answer to what a circular future will look like and how to get there, it is about a deeper understanding of the solution space in which we will be required to operate.”
Sharing finite resources
It is important to discuss what a sustainable built environment looks like for all stakeholders – from material manufacturers to the population as a whole – and to resolve the social, economic and cultural tensions in different locations, said Densley Tingley.
“That is massively going to shape what our material demand looks like in the future,” she explained. “If we can only reach a certain circularity percentage, then we can have the conversation of where the rest of the materials will come from, and how we can get them in a decarbonised way.”
The Energiesprong team installs pre-fabricaded, modular façade elements, reducing retrofit waste while increasing buildings’ energy efficiency. Photo: dena, Claudius Pflug.
Urbanisation and population growth are set to increase the demand for housing and new buildings across the world. Under current International Energy Agency (IEA) projections, by 2070, the equivalent of the city of Paris will be constructed each week globally.
Indeed, the WGBC estimates that 75 percent of the infrastructure needed across the globe by 2050 is yet to be built. For Europe, however, the picture looks quite different: up to 95 percent of the bloc’s buildings expected to be standing in 2050 already exist.
“We have done our development in Europe,” said Densley Tingley. “We need to be mindful of what materials we are using and what we should be freeing up for others to use globally when we’ve got limited carbon budgets and limited resources.”
This is highlighted by a2021 WGBC flagship report: “There are simply not enough finite resources to carry on with the current take-make-waste consumption models,” the authors concluded. “A transition to a circular approach is the only solution to balance international development and environmental goals.”
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