Circular economy – humanity is facing a building material problem. If we continue to consume building materials in this way, we will soon have serious difficulties. We have to be much more careful with our natural resources. Particularly in the construction sector, this requires good planning for new buildings, focusing on durability from the outset and planning for recycling at the end of the building’s service life. All natural processes on this earth function as a cycle. If we were to develop a closed-loop system in the construction industry, we would no longer need to create landfills. 

In addition, we will soon have a lack of material availability. Since 2014, there have been reports from the European Union that we will have worldwide shortages of zinc and copper. Even with sand we have this problem, because meanwhile Germany has started to import the sand from Australia to produce concrete (Prof. Dirk Hebel Karlsruhe). This means that 55% of the total energy consumption of a building is already wasted before it is actually inhabited, and in addition to this, all the climate-damaging emissions have already been dumped into our atmosphere. And now we start and turn the radiator 2°C down, instead of simply developing the walls 10% thinner, which we could do at any time. In this sense, we seem to enjoy too much comfort in our homes and, just to give an example, we probably have too much sound insulation. Even if we could build living rooms with ceilings 16 cm thick, we still build them 32 cm thick. Of course, we do not want to hear our neighbors for three seconds a day.

Our garbage is a design fault. Nowadays, we glue building materials together in such a way that it’s almost impossible to get them apart. In this sense, garbage is a design fault, because we are constantly realizing building elements that we then can no longer bring into a circular architecture with the same quality. Our current built environment has not yet been designed to be reintroduced, so in the future we need a circular economy that begins with careful design. Result: on each of the structural elements used in a building, it could say «I’ve been a house before» or, for example, the sheet metal used on the exterior facade of an office complex has been a church steeple roof before. This is the leitmotif: «Less for more» – Building with less material for more people.