Tina Paillet Co-founder Circotrade and President Elect at RICS shares her viewpoint from our Circular London report, exploring the re-use of building materials.

The materials in existing buildings are full of untapped latent potential which is mostly overlooked and unrecognised. Standard industry practice puts a disproportionate value on new resources while disregarding the existing resources in buildings, seeing them as eventual waste and therefore a problem and a future expense.

Less than 1 per cent of a buildings materials are reused at the end of their useful life and the built environment has a profound impact on the planet:

Reusing the materials contained within existing buildings is key to decarbonization, but first building owners need the tools to unlock the potential in their portfolios to get them onto the path of the circular economy.

Circotrade is a B2B digital trading platform which is specifically developed to tackle the barriers to re-use in the construction and property industry and to attain critical mass for this new asset class.

We encourage the uptake of re-used materials in 3 steps:

Why a Futures Market? The benefits for both buyers and sellers are four-fold:

With Circotrade, the power of finance unlocks the hidden value laying dormant in existing buildings’ materials and products.

Circotrade: Helping the built environment help the planet by extracting environmental, social and financial value from previously disregarded building materials by planning for their future re-use.

Circotrade is part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation community.