The Circular Built Tool
Ready for circular building?
With this tool, you can make your circular ambitions concrete when realizing a project, from beginning to end, with all parties involved. This way, your project will be completely circularly built.
Whom is the "Circular Built" tool for?
The contractor
As circularity is included in increasingly more projects, the contractor will also be confronted with additional circularity requirements at some point. When circular ambitions in a project are made concrete using this tool, it makes it easier for the contractor to assess and correctly budget for the additional requirements in the construction process.
As part of circular construction, an "open" query approach is chosen more frequently, where cooperation at an early stage is encouraged. It is then up to the contractor to come up with solutions and demonstrate their circularity. Using the tool, the contractor, together with the other project partners, can illustrate circularity and thus distinguish itself from its competitors. Moreover, the tool also provides concrete guidance on how to realise certain circular ambitions. For instance, it can illustrate to what extent the chosen building systems and connection methods enable reuse and recycling in the future. Or which concrete measures are needed to maximise reuse in an existing situation. Whenever a building passport is requested, a task that typically falls to the contractor, the tool indicates exactly what this entails. In addition, the tool illustrates what the contractor can do about waste management during the construction phase, the maintenance of the building afterwards, documentation management or innovative business models.
Construction team or consortia
Finally, the tool allows different building partners to jointly translate a client's circular ambitions into concrete measures and requirements. In this way, circularity is communicated in an unambiguous and transparent way and all parties are on the same page from the start.
How do you proceed?
STEP 1: Formulating an overall vision
At the start of a project in which you have circular ambitions, it is important to focus and concretise them. Circular construction is a broad concept that is not understood by everyone in the same way and can covers a lot of different aspects. To clarify this, the first step of this guidance tool consists of describing a clear vision of the project's circularity based on possible future scenarios for the building. It is important here to sufficiently take into account the project specific context and preconditions. In STEP 1, you are asked to briefly write out this vision. A few questions are also formulated to help you write a good vision text.
STEP 3: Concrete selection of circular requirements per theme
In steps 3.1 to 3.4, you need to make a selection of what you want to include in your project and this per major theme. This is done by indicating each time with "yes" or "no" which circular requirements you want to consider. In this way, you make the desired circularity of your project more concrete.
A distinction is made between "MUST HAVES" and "EXTRA'S. The "MUST HAVES" are those circular aspects that are absolutely required when you want to include this aspect. In principle, they are therefore always important, regardless of the context or the building's initially envisaged function. The "EXTRAs" are additional requirements that can be included in order to go even further. They push the level of ambition further upwards. Taking into account the specific context and preconditions of the project, it is up to the user to assess which additional requirements can be included.
STAP 6: Check if circular ambitions were achieved
As the project progresses, the extent to which the circular requirements were achieved can be checked. This is done by indicating in tabs 1.a to 4 in the "check" column for each criterion whether it was achieved (put "yes" or "no"). Sometimes there are external factors that determine whether certain things can be implemented or not. To indicate this, space is provided for comments/lessons learned/points for improvement. The results of this evaluation are visualised in the form of a dashboard in the tab "CHECK". This exercise provides an opportunity to reflect on why the result deviates from the ambitions you set forward, in a positive or negative sense. This can help to make better assessments towards the feasibility of ambitions in future projects and helps to capture lessons learned.
"At the Emergis Living lab, there was a strong commitment to valorise the existing situation with an ambition to retain 24% of the existing structure. In the end, this ambition was exceeded by 4% thanks to the preservation of the foundation, concrete floor and a tiled floor"
Finally, the scores per building component are converted into a percentage that represents the ambition level for the entire building. To do this, the scores per building component are combined with the following weighting factors to produce a total percentage. The weighting factors are taken from DGNB New buildings criteria set - version 2018, TEC1.6 / EASE OF RECOVERY AND RECYCLING.