Building Circularity
New circular design tool is now available. It allows tracking, quantifying and optimizing the circularity of materials sourced and used during the building life-cycle, as well as the circularity at the end of life. It allows getting a holistic picture, as well as detailed breakdown per material type. It also supports applying Design for Disassembly and Design for Adaptability principles. This tool can be used for HQE Economie Circulaire, London Plan Circularity Statement, Ellen McArthur Foundation Circularity Indicators as well as other circular design purposes.
You can view our webinar on Circular Economy and Building Circularity below.
In order to understand how our new Building Circularity tool works we will explain the two important parts of the tool. The building material query, which is the section of the tool in which you will have to enter data, and the results page, which will help you visualize and understand your circularity results.
Building material query explained
You will first have to enter some data. Either directly by adding materials in the building material query of the Building Circularity tool, or by adding the tool to an existing design with data. Once you have added several rows of data, it will look like the screenshot below. For the users of other LCA tools, you might notice that there are a few new sections in the Building Circularity tool.
Recycled, Renewable or Reused contents
The first section that is important is the percentage of recycled, renewable or reused materials in the resource. If you know that a certain material actually consists of recycled, renewable or reused materials, you can edit these percentages accordingly.
With the recycled, renewable or reused percentage is meant the share of either recycled, renewable or reused materials in the product by mass. This information does not influence the LCA results, but is used to document material circularity. Some products have the recycled, renewable or reused percentage defined with a default value, which can be based either on the product, or the type of product.
Waste defines the construction site wastage for the material. Defaults are set based on typical wastage and will vary based on the construction process, building and design.
Design for Disassembly and Design for Adapability
With DfD you should check if the material installation considers Design for Disassembly practices, e.g. using dismontable fasteners instead of glue or if it allows otherwise non destructive removal of the material.
With DfA you should check if the material is adaptable for future adaptions of the use of the building.
End of Life processes
By default materials will have assigned an end of life process. These processes are based on the material type, and you will notice that there will be differences in the end of life processes depending on what material options you use.
If you click on the end of life process, you will see that you are able to select different end of life processes. Select here what is appropriate for your project.
Results page explained
The Building Circularity graph explained
The percentage of materials recovered (in this case, 8.7%) is formed as follows:
Virgin material recovered - Score not included
Renewable material recovered - Full score included
Recycled material recovered - Full score included
Reused material recovered - Full score included
The percentage of materials returned (in this case 40.7%) is formed as follows:
Materials used as materials . Full score included
Materials recycled - Full score included
Materials down-cycled - 50% of score included
Materials used as energy - 50% of score included
Materials disposed - Score not included
The Building Circularity score, (in this case the 25%) which is shown in the middle, is the average from the materials recovered added up to the materials returned.
Building Circularity - Materials recovered
In this section of the results page you will be able to see your recovered materials, and how much of these materials are either virgin materials, materials that are renewable, recycled or reused materials. The amounts represented here come from the percentages that are given to each section in the building material query. If you press the 'details' section, you will be able to see e.g. exactly which construction materials contribute to the virgin, renewable, recycled or reused tons of materials.
Building Circularity - Materials returned
On this section of the results page you will be able to see your returned materials. In this example you will see that none of the materials could be re-used as materials, some materials were recycled or used as energy but by far the largest amount of materials were either down-cycled or disposed of.
Building Circularity - Key Material Groups
In this section you will be able to see the different material groups used in your projects. We have conveniently grouped similar material types and you will be able to see how each of these material groups contribute to the building circularity score. It will also show you the circularity score of each of the groups of materials. In this example you will see that of the different types of concretes, most were virgin materials, and some came from recovered sources. Concrete usually is down-cycled into aggregate, and as you see in the graph downcycling and use as energy is 100%. Since the downcycling score is only counted 50% in the materials returned score, you see that the circularity score of concrete in this project is 30%.
Design for Disassembly and Design for Adaptability principles
Any material that you have marked for either Design for Disassembly or the Design for Adaptability principles will be listed if you maximize the these categories. This will help you get an overview on the usage of these principles in your project, and possibly identifying how these principles can be used more often in future projects.
If you have any questions about the Building Circularity tool, please make a ticket or send a mail to support@bionova.fi. If you are interested in buying either send an email to your regional sales contact or mail sales@bionova.fi.
Related Articles
Selecting building technology resources
Please note that the energy and water consumption are reported separately and the consumption also includes any impacts of technical choices. So this article is purely about modeling the material related impacts. Availability of building technology / ...Building area
Building area functions as a denominator of your calculation results. Press 'Input data' and open 'Building area'. Enter the Gross Internal Floor Area (GIFA) and optionally define additional areas as required by the client or by regulation. GIFA is ...Building LCA according to EN 15978
Read about the building LCA methodology from our other articles: Life cycle stages Impact assessment categories Service life of materials Databases incorporated in One Click LCA Standards supported in One Click LCA Impact assessment / ...Setting your Building Area
Building area functions as a denominator of your calculation results. 1. Click 'Input data' and open 'Building area'. 2. Choose the suggested area definition and enter the Gross Internal Floor Area (GIFA). GIFA will then be used to calculate the ...End of life scenarios for building products
End of life scenario C1 - C2 emissions One Click LCA's calculation method for End-of-life scenario C1 (Deconstruction/demolition) and C2 (Transport) are based on default values for demolition and transport. Please note that the C1/C2 emissions are ...