Sustainability is always a work in progress. Specifiers know to select products that last longer, extending the service life of the building, but they do not always consider what happens to construction materials at the end of their service life.
It is those questions that lie at the heart of circular sustainability. It is a simple concept: rather than considering the environmental credentials of a material solely in terms of how green it is at the time of use, circularity requires a cradle-to-cradle approach to selecting materials that have reduced embedded carbon emissions, extended performance and the ability to be returned to the value chain at the end of their initial service life.
A Dutch government initiative enables developers or building owners to recoup up to 12% of the cost of both building materials and labour, based on circularity criteria. To enable the client to qualify for this financial support, the product supplier must promise to take back the materials at the end of their service life and recycle them or reprocess them so that they can be re-used.
The scheme is structured to incentivise the whole supply chain to get on board with the concept of circularity. For the developer or building owner, it not only provides potentially substantial cost savings on the final account but also delivers an incentive to become actively involved in the specification strategy, which could deliver quality and service life benefits, along with improved sustainability credentials.
For the contractor, the incentive scheme enables due diligence in dealings with the supply chain and puts the onus on the supplier to facilitate circularity. And for building products suppliers, there is an incentive to step up efforts to achieve cradle-to-cradle lifecycles during the product development process.
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