Eberhardt, L C M; Birkved, M and Birgisdottir, H (2022) Building design and construction strategies for a circular economy. Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 18(2), pp. 93-113. ISSN 1745-2007
Abstract
The considerable environmental impacts, resource consumption and waste generation emanating from buildings are a cause of great concern and political attention. Interest in the circular economy (CE) concept of slowing, narrowing and closing material loops through CE strategies (reuse, repair, refurbish, recycle and recover) has grown in recent years to facilitate minimising these unresolved issues emanating from the building industry. Although CE initiatives are proliferating within the industry, wide-scale adoption of CE is still lacking, and the current development and implementation of CE building design and construction strategies is fragmented. Through a systematic literature review (SLR), this study assesses which design and construction strategies are being linked to the concept of CE for new buildings, and their level of application and readiness in a building context. On this basis, the study offers insight into how this field of research is developing and provides directions for future research. From the SLR, a taxonomy is presented that groups the strategies together into 16 overarching building design and construction strategies. An important gap preventing a greater CE uptake within the industry was found to include the lack of knowledge about the environmental performance and related benefits of the various building design and construction strategies. Thus, it is suggested that conveying more comprehensive and uniform adoption of CE in the building industry requires the development of a new design typology to facilitate CE-oriented decision-making in a building context and that prioritises the strategies according to their potential in terms of minimising building-related environmental impacts.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | buildings; built environment; circular economy; design strategies; environmental performance |
| Index terms: | environmental impact, taxonomy, strategy, decision-making, recycle, building industry, building design, design strategy, circular economy, built environment, resource consumption, implementation, waste generation, design and construction, repair, environmental performance, systematic literature review |
| Subjects: | decision analysis, design methods, research evaluation and metrics, sustainable design, infrastructure and transport systems, waste management, contractual arrangements, industry analysis, architectural design, environmental resource management, sustainability assessment, maintenance engineering, management, data analysis and analytics, environmental impact |
| Topics: | Design Practice, Urban Studies, Risk Management, Procurement, Business Strategy, Research Practice, Sustainability |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCEA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here