We all know that the linear manner we construct now – the place supplies make a one-way journey from the earth to landfill – is dangerously unsustainable.
It assumes too many infinites: Infinite uncooked supplies; infinite house for waste; and infinite capability of the biosphere to soak up the greenhouse gases that the one-way journey produces.
This month’s 21CC podcast explores the opportunity of a so-called “round” building trade, one the place high-value inputs are usually not thrown away however as an alternative are repurposed for brand new buildings.
We converse to the authors of a seminal report from Cornell College on how one of many world’s largest economies, the State of New York, might leap off the “Conveyor Belt of Doom” by going round with building.
We meet the staff behind two landmark office-tower refurbishments that made materials re-use a central aim in Brussels, a metropolis that now requires builders to embrace “city mining”.
And we hear from a structural engineer concerned within the redevelopment of London’s Elephant & Fortress, which used 96 tonnes of metal from present buildings there, stopping round 125 tonnes of CO2 from going into the ambiance and exhibiting that even partial steps can have massive impacts.
We might not be on the tipping level the place circularity turns into enterprise as normal but, but it surely’s attainable now to see what such a tipping level would possibly appear like.
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