Circular Options for Building Services: Case Studies; 22 Gordon Street, Arup Circular Building Final Report: December 2018
Circular options for building services: Case Studies; 22 Gordon Street, Arup Circular Building Final Report: December 2018 Ben Croxford (UCL), Ramon Mendoza (UCL), Simon-Joe Portal (Arup), Dimitrios Rovas (UCL) Project funders: The Bartlett Innovation Fund, and Arup UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE), The Bartlett, UCL Faculty of the Built Environment Executive summary The circular economy concept has gained momentum over recent years, but few have analysed its application to the building services sector. This project aims to contribute to unravelling this opportunity (and its constraints) as a joint interest between UCL IEDE, UCL Estates, and Arup, to create useful guidelines for the industry. Building services fall within the ‘sweet spot’ for applying circular economy strategies. Some of the sector’s biggest issues such as; specialty equipment with high (upfront) costs, fast obsolescence, maintenance issues and costs, and the well-known performance gap can be dealt with by applying some of the strategies discussed in this report. Using the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s building blocks and ReSOLVE levers framework, the CIBSE TM56 report on Resource Efficiency in Building Services, and circular case studies found in the industry, this paper sets the base to understand the application of circular economy to building services. Two case studies are analysed: 22 Gordon Street, as a business-as-usual design and construction project with a standard RIBA stages process and The Circular Building by Arup, as a temporary test lab where circular strategies were tested and products assembled together and successfully dismantled at the end of use. Interviews were carried out with four decision-makers involved in the design of 22 Gordon Street and three in The Circular Building to understand the decisions (and reasons) that influenced the selection of certain building services and their circularity according to the previous literature guidelines reviewed.
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