About the Project
Sponsored by EPSRC
Background
The built environment is responsible for 30-42% of carbon emissions, produces over 60% of the UK's waste, and consumes ~50% of all extracted materials. Radical change is urgently required to achieve a sustainable construction sector. CE is an opportunity to turn waste into resources and reduce emissions. However, to date activity has largely focussed on individual buildings, and lacks the national scale, systems-level impact so desperately needed.
Novelty and timeliness
The key novelty of BuildZero lies in its highly interdisciplinary, systems-level approach, which will integrate new knowledge from across the disciplines of engineering, industrial ecology, and social science to develop a systems model of the UK's buildings. This approach allows robust evaluation of the potential of a range of technical solutions designed to deliver a future building stock requiring zero material extraction, zero carbon and zero waste, taking account of social acceptability and economic viability considerations. This interdisciplinary research challenge will stimulate a range of novel work within disciplines, including:
A national assessment of new space provision through repurposing of existing buildings, considering structural assessment, architectural, socio-economic and planning constraints
Creation of a holistic multi-scale optimisation approach to reused resources allocation, accounting for individual building to national scale considerations
Design of new value propositions and circular business models to drive collaborations and material circularity in the construction sector
Development of novel 'prospective life cycle assessment' methods to quantify the environmental impacts of transitioning buildings into a CE model
There is an imperative for this research to be carried out now, driven by societal shifts in building use following the pandemic and the on-going housing and rental crises, against the backdrop of the climate emergency. These require us to identify ways to provide more, better quality, affordable housing, and make better use of national infrastructure. This work urgently needs to be undertaken if the UK is to exploit CE benefits and establish itself as an international leader in this space.
Approach
To realise the BuildZero vision, an interdisciplinary, multi-scale systems model of buildings and resource flows will be developed, focused around four themes (T1-4):
T1. How does the baseline state of the system, including the interplay between societal attitudes, current materials/buildings and legislation constrain moves towards a co-created vision?
T2. How far can solutions that make the best use of space take us towards this vision?
T3. How far can making the best use of materials, including waste resources, take us?
T4. How can our future needs & potential solutions be combined to achieve a BuildZero future?
As well as conducting novel research in each underpinning area, we will commit significant resources to working with stakeholders to synthesise findings on what a CE for buildings looks like, by creating interactive foresight/backcasting tools, co-creating future scenarios and identifying the actions needed to catalyse change. Demonstrator projects will apply work-package (WP) research to specific contexts, generating early impact. We will build a fundamental understanding of how and when to implement CE strategies, investigating economic viability, social inclusivity, and zero-carbon compatibility, considering these across multiple geographical and policy scales.
