Greasing the wheels of the circular economy

Valentina is WSP's circular economy lead for Australia and New Zealand. What drives her is simple – reducing waste in the built environment. And she wants everyone in the design, engineering, and construction industry to understand its importance.

That’s why, last month, Valentina gave a presentation on the circular economy to an audience of waste management professionals at the WasteMINZ conference in Auckland.

She started with a startling statistic. One third of global carbon emissions come from the building sector. Getting that number on a downward track involves reducing the embodied carbon in materials, reducing buildings’ operational carbon, and minimising construction waste.

Think of a shiny new building. In a traditional, linear design approach, it gets constructed after resources are extracted and fashioned into brand new building products. Once the building has reached the end of its life, it’s usually demolished. The materials are often downcycled or end up in landfill.

The circular economy, on the other hand, is about designing out construction waste, keeping materials in use, and returning them back into the system. Materials – usually from existing buildings - are re-used, repaired, and refurbished for as long as possible.

“It’s about maximising the longevity of buildings (or building products) that are still perfectly useable,” says Valentina.

Embedding the circular economy into the design of buildings involves whole-of-life building thinking, carefully thought-out deconstruction, and materials calculators and inventories.

Valentina points to a WSP project underway in Sydney. As many materials as possible are being disassembled, inventoried, and salvaged from an old warehouse, including timber and steel. Some of them will be used for a new building on the same site.

“The end of life for that building is set to become the start of life for another.”

There are some great examples of circular design principles in New Zealand too. WSP’s Westhaven office used to be a carpark, and the old council building in central Auckland has been repurposed and converted into apartments.

Valentina says it’s helpful for designers when thinking about the circular economy to reflect on the layers of a building and their longevity. These include the site it’s built on, its structure, ‘skin’, services, interior space, and fittings.

“The ‘building by layers’ concept helps designers identify the most appropriate circular design strategies for each layer. For example, we should look for opportunities of adaptive reuse for the structure of an existing building; a façade should be designed for disassembly, interiors fit-out should be designed for flexibility, adaptability, and so on.

“Imagine kitchenettes in an office building. If they're all the same size, you can easily replace broken pieces, or swap between levels as needed.

“We’re currently re-fitting WSP’s Sydney office and are trying to see how many of the fittings we can salvage, re-use, and donate. There are hundreds of desks and chairs, and all manner of furnishings.”

For the circular economy approach to work, everybody involved in a building’s procurement, design, and construction (or deconstruction) stages, needs to get behind it, says Valentina.

“There’s no point carefully designing a façade that can be disassembled if the re-use message is lost along the way, and it ends up being thrown out.”

Globally, Valentina says Denmark and Holland are leading the way in applying circular economy principles to the built environment. Across the English Channel in the City of London, some building projects are now required to submit circular economy statements as part of their planning applications.

Valentina wants to see the same thing happening across Australasia. It’s a sentiment echoed by WSP NZ senior waste consultant Rowan Latham, who says New Zealand is still in the early stages of embedding a circular economy, with early adopters taking the lead in the absence of clear guidelines and incentives. 

"While it feels like people are really starting to understand the importance of a circular economy, it’s apparent that we just don’t have the same incentives for investing in circularity compared to many of our trading partners, which already have those important directives and policies that mandate circularity in construction," he says.

Rowan says that by looking at how other jurisdictions have implemented their approaches, and how we can assign value to the resources we consume, New Zealand will be able to leverage work happening overseas to fast-track its journey towards a more circular economy.

Meanwhile,  in Australia, Valentina is leading the conversation by delivering standout circular economy projects such as the Circular Design Guidelines for the Built Environment on behalf of the NSW Government, Melbourne’s Arden Precinct and the new University of Tasmania campus.

“Waste is a valuable resource. We should embrace it positively instead of discarding it,” she says.

“The potential for implementing circular economy principles in the built environment presents huge opportunities. As an industry, it’s our collective responsibility to do more to seize these and advocate for this transformative decarbonisation practice.”