Principle 2
Designing & enabling circular buildings
This principle’s objective is about embedding circularity in a project from a whole life cycle perspective, from strategic planning to enabling the next use for materials, through careful design decisions and material specification.
Principle 2 application note: this principle ideally should be incorporated into early RIBA stages and, at the latest, by stage 2, Concept Design.
Designing for circularity
The UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) states that design approaches should focus on maximising the use of existing materials and structures, followed by designing for material health, adaptability, flexibility, replaceability, disassembly, optimum service life, product separability, ease of maintenance and scarcities.
Thoughtful design approaches should assess and determine the capacity for the circular building to accommodate for reconfiguration and disassembly (i.e., provision of installation and disassembly guides).
Commitments should include appropriate strategies for all the different circular building layers and next use scenarios with highest material value in mind.
Designing for a circular future: maximising existing materials, adaptability, and flexibility for optimum service life and material value
Designing for circularity: material optimisation, reuse & emerging secondary markets are key factors to consider.
Enabling circularity
This is about enabling a more circular building by considering opportunities for material optimisation, reclamation, and reuse.
At the end of life, products, components, and materials should be recovered at the highest possible value. This means design teams avoid specifying materials and products that have no known recovery route, incentivising the servitisation and leasing of building materials and products.
Further focus should be on the provision of digital information on construction products (i.e., material passports), giving easy access to material and component data facilitating reuse and recycling as well as socio-environmental metrics and financial residual values.
This also includes actively pursuing opportunities to help establish emerging secondary materials markets. This will increase the likelihood of material reuse for other circular buildings and open opportunities for material procurement