Learning from older brothers

On 5 February 2019, Sébastien Garnier and Soraya Molinero from HOUSEFUL’s partners Housing Europe and LGI respectively have attended Buildings as Material Banks – A Pathway for a Circular Future, the final event of the EU-funded BAMB project held in Brussels. In particular, Garnier was part of the panel that shared ‘The voice of the Industry’.

He highlighted that, currently, in the social, public and cooperative sectors, the issue of circular buildings is mainly tackled by a front-runner group. Still, there is a need to intensify this work in order to translate a more effective use of resources into more affordable housing methods. The challenge is particularly important when looking at the huge wave of energy retrofits that is expected in the coming years.

“Let’s not repeat the same mistakes and regret our resource inefficient, unhealthy and expensive renovation methods in 10 – 20 years“ added Garnier. „In that sense, projects like HOUSEFUL and BAMB deliver useful tools that can help housing providers implement new circular solutions through innovative options.”

BAMB seeks to develop a circular approach to the use of buildings, systems, products and materials. HOUSEFUL can profit from BAMB’s experience on building and material passports, circular building assessment methodology and reversible building design protocol.

At the Conference, challenges to scale up circular solutions have been also presented. Examples are complex and multifaceted supply chain, multiple ownership and occupation profiles in the buildings, and lack of standardization of design at European level. BAMB also provided over 20 policy recommendations to the European Commission on how to change the design culture, value definition and improve collaboration across actors. The recommendations are available here.

The main results achieved by BAMB over the course of the project are available here.