In BAMB, 16 partners from 8 European countries are working together with one mission – enabling a systemic shift in the building sector by investigating and creating circular solutions. The project is developing and integrating approaches, methods and tools that will enable this shift: Materials Passports and Reversible Building Design – supported by new business models, policy propositions, and decision-making models. During the course of the project, these new approaches will be demonstrated and refined with input from 6 pilots.
Status
Period
In BAMB, 16 partners from 8 European countries are working together with one mission – enabling a systemic shift in the building sector by investigating and creating circular solutions. Today, building materials end up as waste when no longer needed, meanwhile destroying ecosystems, increasing environmental costs, and creating risks of resource scarcity. To create a sustainable future, the building sector needs to move towards a circular system, a pattern in which buildings and building materials are used, reused, adapted and re-built over and over again. Whether an industry goes circular or not depends on the value of the materials within it – worthless materials are considered as waste, while valuable materials are reused or recycled. Increased value equals less waste, and that is what BAMB is creating – ways to maintain and increase the value of building materials.
BAMB will contribute to the enablement of a systemic shift where buildings designed for Change can be incorporated into a circular economy. Through design and circular value chains, materials in buildings maintain their value – in a sector producing less waste and using less virgin resources. Instead of being to-be waste, buildings will function as banks of valuable materials, building materials and building systems – conserving material value and functionality, so materials and building components can be reused, and thus decreasing the need for primary resource mining. The project is developing and integrating approaches, methods and tools that will enable the shift: Materials Passports and Reversible Building Design – supported by new business models, policy propositions, and management and decision-making models. During the course of the project, these new approaches will be demonstrated and refined with input from 6 pilots. The BAMB project started in September 2015 and will progress for 3.5 years as an innovation action within the EU funded Horizon 2020 program.
Through interdisciplinary research, EnergyVille/VITO analyses the main technical, economical, financial, legal, spatial and logistic drivers within the current dominant systems. Key barriers and opportunities for Materials Passports and Reversible Building Design protocols in the current system are identified for different actors within the value network. Based on co-creation activities within the BAMB community and interactions with the external stakeholders systemic changes are defined, in order to support the transition towards a circular and change-supporting built environment.
In addition, EnergyVille/VITO contributes to the development of an integrated assessment framework enabling better decisions to be made in ensuring the environmental and financial value of buildings, and their constituent parts. The methodology will be tested on building pilots. Finally, EnergyVille/VITO supports commercial companies linked to these pilots in modelling circular business models and policy makers in providing measures supporting circular economy within the built environment.
