How are circular economy principles taking hold in real estate?

Leading cities are now setting goals to tackle carbon throughout a building’s lifecycle

Decarbonizing cities will take more than cutting carbon emissions from buildings operations.

As cities commit to ambitious net zero targets, the most progressive among them are now considering how they can better plan building lifecycles, from construction to maintenance and ultimately, demolition.

The construction industry is the world’s biggest producer of waste. In the EU, construction and demolition waste accounts for approximately one-third of total waste, and around 40 percent of solid waste in the United States.

That needs to change – and quickly – if cities are to achieve a net zero future. It’s why circular economy thinking, which aims to eliminate waste, is growing in popularity. It has profound implications for decarbonizing cities because it factors in whole-life emissions – the carbon generated by producing and transporting materials through to their use and disposal.

“Circular economy principles are about preserving the value of assets by embedding zero-waste thinking early in the lifecycle and designing with reuse or repurposing in mind,” says Cynthia Curtis, SVP and Corporate Sustainability Officer, Americas at JLL. “They redefine the concept of waste, recognizing the value in the materials. Reducing the carbon emissions of planned new buildings can significantly help the transition to net zero.”

However, that’s only part of the solution. In North America and Europe, for example, around 80 percent of buildings that will be in use in 2050 already exist today and will fall far short of future carbon reduction targets. Yet knocking down an old building to build a new, greener building, is not an effective approach.

“Retrofitting older buildings is so important; the carbon has already been spent in creating that structure,” adds Curtis. “Through reuse and repurposing, the spent carbon can be leveraged more efficiently.” Regulations on the horizon

Incoming regulations in major cities are increasingly front of mind for developers. Amsterdam will halve the use of new raw materials by 2030 on the road to being fully circular by 2050.

Los Angeles is aiming to be the largest city in the U.S. to achieve zero waste, targeting a 90 percent landfill diversion rate by 2025, while Melbourne is also on a similar path. Paris, which wants 50 percent of construction sites to send no waste to landfill by 2030, is leading the way with Design for Reuse Principles. These encourage developers to focus on projects that can accommodate different functions over time – housing, offices, hotels – without the need for renovations or major upgrades. By 2030, 30 percent of its office stock will need to be adaptable.

“The principle of reuse has a much wider context than simply decarbonization – it’s about being able to respond to changes in the future of work or in social patterns,” says Jeremy Kelly, Global Research Director, City Futures at JLL. “It addresses how the value of assets can be maximised over the long term, and how our building stock can be better managed.”

New materials drive progress

Ongoing shortages of construction materials have also contributed to a growing awareness of the need for circular principles in real estate.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in client inquiries about waste management strategies,” says Curtis. “Waste reduction is a direct precursor to a circular economy because the most effective method is to design for reuse at the outset.” At the same time, there’s a growing range of reusable materials supporting circular construction, such as Cradle to Cradle (C2C) products that can be returned to manufacturers for repurposing.

Carbon-negative materials including mycelium insulation and certain bioplastics remove carbon from the atmosphere during production. Innovations in manufacturing have also led to carbon-neutral concrete and lower-carbon steel.

A new generation of sustainable developments are spearheading such products. Amsterdam’s mixed-use Park 20|20, which features one of the world’s largest collections of C2C materials such as reusable structural frames, is one of the protagonists.

In Hamburg, Landmarken AG is currently building Germany’s first residential complex where more than 50 percent of materials were selected with reuse in mind – and many are Cradle to Cradle certified. Schemes like London’s Whole Life-Cycle Carbon Assessment and Paris’ RE2020 will encourage more such developments in the coming years.

“Cities with regulations to encourage considerations of whole-life carbon and building adaptability see greater traction more quickly,” says Curtis.

Regulation lags market forces

Despite the headline actions of leading cities, legislation is lagging in many others. Market pressure from businesses who increasingly seek low-carbon, low-waste spaces is having a greater impact, says Kelly.

One challenge is that the cost of circular design can initially be higher, but it can cover several traditional building lifecycles.

The lack of financial incentives, education and regulatory guidance can also make it more difficult for businesses to adopt a circular mindset, notes Curtis, holding back the industry-wide change necessary for circular construction.

“The building lifecycle involves many players – investors, developers, architects, manufacturers, contractors and suppliers,” says Kelly. “To embed circularity in this complex value chain requires much deeper collaborative business models. And we need this transition to drive the sustainability progress that’s paramount for the built environment.”

Source: JLL

Bamboo pushed as alternative building technology in PHL

Bamboo is expected to be included in the latest edition of the National Structural Code of the Philippines (NSCP) as an alternative building technology.

Base Bahay Foundation, Inc. has piloted local research and the use of bamboo in socialized housing due to its sustainability, resiliency to natural disasters and cost efficiency.

“The sooner we get the release of the NSCP with bamboo as part of its eight edition, the sooner we can entice all engineers and architects to start thinking of bamboo as a construction mainstream,” Pablo A. Jorillo, Jr., general manager at Base, told reporters at the Bamboost architecture and design forum in Makati City on Sept. 15.

Mr. Jorillo said this would be the first “tipping point” to push bamboo towards mass adoption in construction and regulation.

Johann Baar, director for affordable housing and technology at Hilti Foundation, said the Base Innovation Center is working on the building code for bamboo.

This is aligned with the Philippine National Standard 22157 that informs testing procedures for obtained bamboo culms, and the International Organization for Standardization 22156 that aims to institutionalize the use of bamboo in structural design.

However, Mr. Baar noted that bamboo still carries the stigma of being “the poor man’s material” which is not durable and can quickly deteriorate.

He noted bamboo research has shown that a few species have a capacity for construction.

“It’s not just social housing. It’s a strong and resilient material for any kind of building construction. We are on our way to making it a standard building material like timber,” Mr. Baar said.

Mr. Baar mentioned that some Latin American countries have used bamboo technology to build structures up to three levels that have stood up to 400 years, alongside applications in resorts and domes.

“We are seeing its potential in medium- and high-rise structures,” Mr. Baar said. “When you look at timber structures, it took us a decade or more to see it in high-rise structures. It’s just a question of a couple of years hopefully.”

SOCIALIZED HOUSING

Given bamboo’s abundance in the global south, Base first saw the opportunity to use the alternative material to address the Philippines’ housing problem.

Citing its advantages, Mr. Jorillo said that bamboo lowers the cost of housing by 30-40% compared to units built with standard concrete hollow blocks.

Base’s cement bamboo frame technology, which uses load-bearing bamboo with metal connections and mortar cement plaster, is designed to withstand typhoons of 240-280 kilometers per hour and resist earthquakes of 6.5-7.5 magnitude, he said.

Base has built over 1,500 homes nationwide, with about a third in Negros Occidental. This is part of its Impact 2025 project, where it aims to build 10,000 sustainable housing units.

Other areas serviced by Base include Batangas, Sorsogon, Tacloban, Dumaguete, Davao, Cotabato, and Bukidnon.

Mr. Jorillo said that Base is working with the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development, local government units, nongovernment organizations, as well as the private sector such as Ayala Land, Inc. and Megaworld Corp., for more opportunities in bamboo construction and housing technology.

Base has also built about 400 houses in Nepal, with plans to expand in Sri Lanka and India next, he noted.

Source: Business World

Ultra-Sustainable Building Technologies Are Hitting the Mainstream

Trondheim, Norway, a city of 180,000 just 200 miles from the Arctic Circle on the coast of the frigid Norwegian Sea, hardly seems an ideal location for harvesting energy from the sun and surrounding environment. But a new 200,000-square-foot office building there is producing nearly half a million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy per year—twice as much as the building uses. The extra energy is powering other nearby buildings and charging electric cars, buses and boats throughout the city.

Highly sustainable buildings have been popping up around the U.S. and the world over the past decade. But now a confluence of new technologies and improving economics, as well as climate-change-inspired government regulation, are leading to the next wave in big construction: ultra-sustainable buildings. This new generation of green buildings is hitting environmental goals that would have seemed inconceivable just ten years ago—in some cases not just avoiding all harm to the environment, but actually improving it, leading the communities and cities around these buildings down greener paths.

These futuristic-seeming buildings promise to close a yawning gap in the world's efforts to slow climate change and mitigate its harms. About 40 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from the heating, cooling and lighting of buildings—and that's not including substantial emissions from the construction of conventional buildings. Sharply curtailing these emissions is an essential part of fighting climate change.

To appreciate what goes into making an ultra-sustainable building, consider what it took to build  the one in Trondheim. The product of a collaboration between five Norwegian real-estate-industry organizations, the plans called for zero-emissions energy to heat, cool and otherwise power the structure. To get that energy, the developers built solar panels into the building's 31,000 square feet of exterior skin and pumped in what scant heat could be wrung from the nearby ocean waters. The result was the "Powerhouse Brattørkaia" building, finished in 2019, and now a model of how buildings can push out more clean energy than they consume.

Another ultra-sustainable building that's boosting community energy is the PAE Living Building in Portland, Oregon, designed by ZGF Architects as an office building. It relies on insulation and ventilation to reduce energy consumption by 80 percent compared to typical office buildings, and collects and treats rainwater to meet the building's water needs. Because of limited space for solar panels, it couldn't generate all of its energy needs onsite. To make up the difference, it paid a nearby low-income housing project to install solar panels that generate enough electricity to power both the building and the housing project. "It makes sense to look at energy production from a regional point of view, rather than just in each individual building alone," says Kathy Berg, a principal at ZGF, which has been involved in a number of ultra-sustainable projects.

The motivation to use ultra-sustainable ideas in new commercial development—as well as to retrofit existing buildings to make them more sustainable—is economics. The costs of green technologies have been rapidly dropping. Solar energy, in particular, is becoming a better and better deal, falling in price about ten percent a year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. "Renewable energy is becoming the smarter choice economically," says David Orr, a professor emeritus at Oberlin College and one of the pioneers of ultra-sustainable building design. "Anyone who buys a building that isn't solar-powered is just wasting their money." Regulators at local, state and federal levels are also demanding greener buildings.

Powerhouse BrattørkaiaCourtesy of Snøhetta

Making a building "net energy positive"—that is, capable of producing more renewable energy than it uses—is getting easier thanks in part to big improvements in solar panels. Panels today produce about 50 percent more electricity per square foot as they did ten years ago, and experimental versions are already doubling today's output. Some new rooftop panels further boost output by capturing reflected light from the roof itself, as well as direct sunlight.

Thanks to advances in electronics that make solar-energy-generating components thinner and lighter, as well as materials innovations that can hide the components behind attractive, translucent coatings, these components can now be built into the panels that make up a building's outer skin, and they can be retrofitted into older buildings. In the German town of Bochum, a 12-unit apartment building that dates back to the 1930s was updated with solar skin panels that now supply the building's 45-kilowatt-hour-per-square-foot electricity consumption—with plenty of energy left over to pump back into the local grid.

Another rapidly improving energy-gathering technology is heat pumps, which enlist a circulating gas that is expanded and compressed in a way that grabs heat from outside air, soil or water—even if it's cold—and releases it indoors. (Reversing the process provides cool air during the summer.) Heat pumps had long been useless in colder regions, but the best ones today rely on new types of gases and more powerful compressors to work in below-zero temperatures. Because they run on electricity from the grid, rather than from burning natural gas, they save on emissions, and they are typically four times more efficient than conventional electric heat. Boston University's new computing and data science center, a 300-foot-tall, 345,000-square-foot tower that opened last year, depends entirely on heat pumps to get through the city's often-brutal winters.

Producing energy is only half the recipe for ultra-sustainability in new buildings or to bring higher levels of sustainability to existing buildings, notes ZGF's Berg. "Energy generation is really the second step," she says. "The first step is to reduce the amount of energy the building needs." For starters, that means state-of-the-art insulation to keep heat in or out, and efficient LED lighting—steps that are now the rule in new buildings and being retrofitted into many older ones. Further reductions are being made with special design features for managing sunlight and ventilation. For example, these features were instrumental in achieving the low energy needs of the new California Air Resources Board headquarters building designed by ZGF. To maintain comfortable indoor temperatures, motorized shades regulate sunlight entering the building through its giant skylights, and fans move air from cooler to warmer areas. To go even further, notes Berg, some buildings are now being designed to capture prevailing winds as natural ventilation systems.

Powerhouse BrattørkaiaCourtesy of Snøhetta

Electronic smarts are playing an increasingly large role in ultra-sustainability, too, both in a wide range of new buildings and in updating older buildings. Often at the heart of smart building systems are sensors that track where people are in a building—and where they aren't. "The heating and cooling systems can find out there's nobody on the fourth floor, and dramatically cut back on the heated or cooled air that's being sent there, as well as on the lighting," says Katie McGinty, chief sustainability officer at Johnson Controls, which produces smart building systems. "Cars today are computers on wheels, but until now too little of that digitization has made its way into buildings."

In addition, smart buildings, whether old or new, can monitor minute-to-minute price changes on the electric power grid, and adjust heating and cooling timing to take advantage of dips and spikes in the price. As more building occupants plug in electric vehicles, notes McGinty, the buildings can even look for opportunities to sell some of the available battery power in the EVs back to the grid at peak prices, recharging them when prices drop. And if there's solar power onsite, a building can work that into the mix, too, storing some of the solar electricity in batteries when it's sunny, and using it or selling it to the grid when it's cloudy or prices go back up.

Because adding in highly efficient solar panels, heat pumps and insulation enables new and retrofitted buildings to generate more green energy than they consume, they're in a position to provide the excess to others. Many already do that by selling the excess to the grid, helping the grid reach its own renewable energy goals. Increasingly, buildings are striking deals that enable more direct green-energy sharing with neighboring buildings and facilities, as the Powerhouse building in Trondheim did.

As prices continue to fall, ultra-sustainability measures are expected to continue to gain ground among developers of all sizes and budgets, making buildings more of a climate asset than a liability.

Source: Newsweek