2023 – Our Year in Circularity
2023 has been a busy year for the Reusefully team, filled with many diverse and interesting activities. Our co-founders Gilli Hobbs and Katherine Adams reflect on the year just about to end and what we can look forward to in 2024.
A proposal we developed on New Year’s Day this year for Habitat for Humanity, has resulted in a project that has been ongoing throughout most of 2023 - and represents a bit of a departure from our normal projects. Having a deep dive in the opportunities for circular economy in low-income housing in the Global South, has certainly broadened our horizons and taken us on a virtual tour of Peru, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines and India. Talking to dedicated circular economy stakeholders around the world and learning about the initiatives that are underway, many of them being pursued in challenging circumstances, has been inspiring.
With planning and client requirements driving circularity, it should be easier to make things happen here in the UK. However, there are still many challenges and uncertainties blocking a smooth transition to a more circular economy in construction.
Much of our work relates to the newly emerging Pre-Redevelopment Audits and the requirements and recommendations that come out of these, including Pre-Demolition and Pre-Refurbishment Audits. From old WW2 aeroplane factories, to distilleries, ‘prestige’ offices and dilapidated industrial sheds; each potential ‘donor’ asset due for demolition or strip-out has ‘stuff’ that is re-useful and sometimes beautiful and historic. Our job as a circular economy consultancy and advisor is to make this ‘stuff’ visible and highlight its value for ‘recipient’ projects.
Having carried out a fair few audits this year, it is clear that the future focus of the construction and property sector should be to enable a lot more reuse and higher value recycling. For this, we have developed and adopted a ‘materials value retention hierarchy’ approach, which we are using on all our projects and is starting to gain traction elsewhere.
Another way to build consensus and focus efforts is through standardisation work. As the chair of BSI Circular Economy in Construction Committee (B558/1), Gilli is particularly grateful to all those who volunteer their time to help with this vital, although often arduous and painstaking work. Affiliated to the CEN TC350 SC1 group, the demands on these experts to find harmonised solutions in key areas such as circularity assessment, material/building passports, quality assurance for reuse, designing for circularity and pre-demolition audits and evaluation has never been higher, or more crucial.
In addition to standards work, we’ve also been talking to Government and planners at different levels, sharing our understanding of the practice of applying circularity to the design and implementation of policy – this is going to be the real game changer. Many bodies, including the European Commission, are well down the road on this.
We have been lucky, in fact, at Reusefully to play a small part in this global movement to make better use of resources in 2023, working with many others who share our goal to try to make a difference. A very small part of this is our sponsorship of the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products (ASBP) Reuse Now Campaign, which is as the name suggests, is promoting reuse through case studies, events and knowledge sharing.
Looking forward to 2024, it is all going to be about ‘doing more with less’, especially with our own time and resources. This means streamlining our processes, further use of digitisation and scanning technology and partnering seamlessly with others. This will speed up the provision of data and recommendations, thus allowing more time to focus on implementation and demonstrating the benefits of circular construction.
In a similar vein, our work in the British and European standards community aims to harmonise data, assessment and quality assurance aspects of circularity to reduce duplication of effort and incompatibility between systems and professionals.
Collectively we can all work to ‘do more with less’ , so let’s make that our resolution for 2024 and beyond!
