Clive Nichol, CEO at Fabrix shares his viewpoint on designing a circular built environment from our latest 'Circular London: Building a renewable city' report.
 
As a developer and investor with the modest ambition to help shape a more sustainable and equitable world, we have a number of pillars guiding the way we work. Chief amongst these is reducing our environmental impact — a big part of which is being mindful of opportunities to reuse and not wasting stuff. As an industry, our carbon emissions are a terrifying three times that of the aviation sector. We have an obligation to reduce our consumption and fast.
 
More often than not, for us that means reusing buildings rather than starting from scratch. But regardless of whether it’s a retrofit project or ground-up development, we’re always guided by the circular economy (or zero waste) design principles of ‘rethink/redesign; reduce; reuse; recycle/recover ’ and the Circular Buildings Toolkit. Reusing materials as much as possible but almost more importantly, challenging the need for additional material at all unless it really is justified. Why specify a decorative material to apply over an already functional concrete core, even if it’s low-carbon, for example?
 
Our Atelier Gardens project in Berlin is a good example of our approach to the circular economy. We’re transforming the six acre-film studio site — one of the oldest in Europe — into a creative campus for global impact-led organisations, to sit alongside film and media pioneers. It’s underpinned by a zero waste to landfill ethos and has become a test-bed for a lot of our thinking.
 
We’re knocking nothing down — instead, sensitively repurposing listed studios and outdated office buildings, finding new uses for redundant structures, improving energy efficiency and adding new rooftop gardens, pavilions, cafes and sun-shading. What would commonly be treated as ‘waste’ materials, such as old window frames, insulation, doors and flooring are being reused on site or donated, rather than being discarded.
 
And the no-waste commitment extends to the regreening strategy too — we’re reintroducing nature on a mammoth scale. It would have been tempting to rip out all the concrete and contaminated soil and start again. But we’re taking a regenerative, longer-term approach — carefully specifying plants with the ability to not only thrive in harsh environments but gradually decontaminate the soil over time, whilst reusing crushed concrete on site to create hard landscaping, planting mediums and insect habitats, enhancing the biodiversity of the site.
 
We’re also working hard to make the most of ‘waste’ closer to home. Our move at the back-end of 2021 to salvage 139 tonnes of steel from a building being demolished in Broadgate was a UK first for a developer at the time. And thankfully appears to have helped kickstart the wider adoption of a practice which had always appeared a total ‘no-brainer’ to us.
 
Currently almost no steel is disassembled, recertified and reused. The vast majority is sent abroad to be smelted and recycled, despite the fact it will still need to be tested and certified on its return to the UK. We figured why not just remove that massively carbon intensive travelling and smelting stage — a move that we understand reduces the carbon impact by up to 80% compared to using recycled steel.
 
In our experience, the barrier to this way of working hasn’t been a lack of knowledge, creativity or innovation across the industry. The consultants we work with have jumped at the chance to put these long-understood principles into practice.
 
The chief obstacles are of course inevitably interrelated. First, a lack of appetite for ‘risk’ from clients to try anything new that could disrupt project programmes. Second, the lack of a tech-enabled open marketplace to make the trading of used construction materials scalable (so we welcome the emergence of innovative platforms such as CircoTrade). And third, the distinct lack of regulation from government.
 
Europe certainly seems to be leading the way on regulating embodied carbon reduction currently. The UK urgently needs to do more so as not to fall behind. Cracking the adoption of the industry-initiated Part Z amendment to building regs would go a long way in giving the industry the confidence it needs to properly mobilise and innovate.