Smart Building Towards Circular Economy
The Circular Economy is a model for long-term growth that envisions modern civilizations redesigning, producing, and consuming goods and services in a regenerative economic cycle that separates economic progress from resource depletion. Future and emerging digital technologies, such as advanced mobile networks, Distributed Ledger Technologies, Edge Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet of Things, are critical enablers of circular business practices because they optimize continuous flows of energy and materials back into manufacturing processes while also making inefficiencies transparent.
As a result, smart technologies play a critical part in the Circular Economy transition by enabling and facilitating truly sustainable corporate processes, such as efficient asset management, data sharing and analysis, collaboration, co-innovation, and shared value generation.
The role of emerging and future ICT as a Circular Economy enabler is the focus of the Smart Circular Economy. The goal is to look into how smart digital technologies can help to develop circular processes, services, and business models; how smart digital systems and platforms can reform design and decision-making mechanisms; and how these concepts can be applied to verticals like smart cities, precision agriculture, and renewable energy infrastructure, to name a few. The papers in this special issue, when combined, will be a great resource for all types of organizations working in the transition to a sustainable and flourishing future economy.
We define circular construction as the design, construction, and destruction of houses and buildings with an emphasis on high-quality material reuse and sustainability goals in the areas of energy, water, biodiversity, and ecosystems. The Bullitt Center in Seattle, for example, is totally circular and is sometimes referred to as the world's greenest commercial building.
The role of urban planning
The promotion of circularity relies heavily on urban planning. All new ideas must adopt circular architecture; only then will it be able to reuse all components 100 percent beyond 2050. Existing houses and buildings are considerably more difficult to renovate than new ones. As a result, circular targets must be used.
The contribution of urban mining
The world is full of resources and the existing structures include a wealth of precious resources that could be used further. The non-circular construction method used in the past makes it difficult to secure these components in a usable state during the demolition process. The use of specialized techniques allows a high percentage of expensive materials to be saved. We're talking about urban mining here. Regrettably, re-used materials are often more expensive than new ones at this time. As a result, a shift from labor taxes to raw material taxes will assist the circular economy.
Issuing building permits
The city of Amsterdam took a big step forward in terms of awarding building permits, allowing for circularity. Five themes are covered in the assessment of new building projects based on the above-mentioned definition of circular building: use of materials, water, energy, ecosystems, resilience, and adaptivity. Each of these topics can be examined from four perspectives:
- reduced consumption of materials, water, and energy
- reduction in the degree and manner in which reuse is ensured
- sustainable manufacture and acquisition of all necessary supplies.
- sensible management, such as a complete listing of all components used.
Each project chooses its own set of criteria, based on whether it's about giving building permits or renovating, as well as the location of the construction. Consider the difference between a virgin site and a central location in a magnificent setting to understand this clearly.