Under the leadership of the Ministry of the Environment, Finland is preparing a national circular economy program to be published in December. It is about a longer-term strategic program, which, however, in terms of the real estate and construction sector, also needs practical measures - shovel-ready solutions.
The construction sector, which deals with huge masses of land and buildings, offers excellent opportunities for promoting the circular economy. It is important to develop new methods, but at the same time also to highlight and strengthen existing examples.
In the circular economy, the central idea is that raw materials and materials remain in use by the economy for a long time, the value of the materials is preserved and the adverse effects on the environment are reduced.
The buildings and the building materials used in them are in use for a very long time. Sustainably built buildings and their frame structures can serve multiple purposes and different user groups throughout their life cycle, when they meet different structural, safety and health requirements in their new use. The low-carbon road map prepared by Rakennusteollisuus RT also showed that extending the life cycle of buildings and renovations that improve energy efficiency are overwhelmingly effective ways to quickly reduce emissions in the built environment.
At the end of the life cycle of buildings, building materials – especially mineral-based ones – are waste after light processing, ready to be reused either as such or as part of new building materials. If so desired, mineral materials mostly do not leave the technical material cycle at all, and in addition to them, new waste and by-products from other sectors can also be diverted into the cycle as new components. A good example of such versatile material and energy utilization is the manufacture of cement.
There are already good and long-term infrastructure construction references for some of the construction waste streams, which the public sector, as a pioneer, must continue to strengthen. For certain waste streams that simply cannot be reused, energy utilization should be a purely nationally defensible interest. Equally, it must be accepted that some of the hazardous waste from construction will end up in landfills.
In construction, the circular economy often collides with product approval and waste legislation. Recycling ideas are met with a lot of standards and unclear official practices. Efforts should be made to remove the heavy waste status from waste materials and equate them as recycled materials with primary materials. It should be enough that the materials meet the criteria set for them, in which case there is also no basis for possible subsidies that distort competition between them.
The circular economy needs a predictable and encouraging operating environment that encourages operators to participate. Market-orientation and voluntariness will be important elements of circular economy operations, also when thinking about control methods and dismantling obstacles to the circular economy.
Efficiency measures must be planned and implemented on a long-term basis in cooperation between different stakeholders. The issue is not new, but it will be encountered again when the national circular economy program is launched. In the circular economy of construction, the huge amounts of materials tied to the built environment are part of the national wealth, the development of which must be taken care of together.
Pekka Vuorinen
environment and energy director
Confederation of Finnish Construction Industries (CFCI)
Write a comment