Circular construction ecosystems: Designing a Circularity Information Platform for the Built Environment
Yifei Yu is a PhD student in the Department of High-Tech Business Entrepreneurship. (Co)Promotors are Prof.dr. M.E. Iacob†, prof.dr.ir. M.R.K. Mes and dr. D.M. Yazan from the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences and dr. M.C. van den Berg from the Faculty of Engineering Technology.
Circular Economy (CE) practices prioritise the continuous use and regeneration of resources, aiming to create a closed-loop system where waste is minimised, and materials are kept in use for as long as possible. While the literature acknowledges the importance of transitioning to a circular built environment, previous research has predominantly focused on the technical aspects of circular management for individual building projects. Currently, CE opportunities are not efficiently captured in the built environment at scale. It remains unclear how to collectively manage multiple circular building projects as a whole to accelerate the CE transition.
Beyond the boundary of one individual project, a higher demand has been raised for establishing symbiotic material interactions among various projects to upscale the CE implementation. This thesis aims to advance the state-of-the-art towards a new paradigm of Circular Construction Ecosystems, where resources for one project can be traced back from the secondary material streams of other projects. Such a waste-to-resource approach has its roots in Industrial Symbiosis, a branch of industrial ecology that fosters mutual benefits through material, energy, and service exchanges among different entities. Managing circular building projects at scale is a challenging task due to the systemic and complex nature of CE, requiring collaborations between private and public stakeholders at both business and policy-making levels. Currently, there is a lack of interdisciplinary solutions to orchestrate complex circular material flows across multiple building projects at scale.
Digital technologies pave a critical path towards CE. Particularly, digital collaboration platforms for the circular built environment are emerging as a new research trend. More efficient information systems are in demand to identify, coordinate, and evaluate CE opportunities, up-scaling CE implementation at a broader ecosystem level. This thesis proposes an integrated digital solution towards a circular built environment, highlighting the role of digital technologies in enabling efficient and circular construction practices. Specifically, a Circularity Information Platform (CIP) is proposed as one of the promising solutions to tackle multi-scale CE challenges in the built environment.
This research explores the design of CIP through a Design Science research approach. First, a set of interviews with local stakeholders and two systematic literature reviews establish the practical and theoretical foundations for the design of CIP, respectively. Second, a high-level design blueprint of CIP is proposed in the form of reference architecture. Third, an Industrial Symbiosis perspective is introduced to analyse symbiotic material interactions among projects, bridging the design blueprint of CIP with the focused development of a matchmaking function. Fourth, a waste-to-resource matchmaking function is developed and demonstrated in the form of an agent-based simulation model incorporated with conceptual circularity hubs. Finally, the designed artefacts are validated through the case of a closed-loop concrete supply chain in the Twente region, the Netherlands, with practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and students.
I define CIP as "An information system that provides decision support to make circular material transactions viable among multiple (de)construction projects at scale". To provide a high-level orientation of the solution that is envisaged to accelerate CE implementation in the built environment, a potential solution concept that can be derived from this research is as follows: "If (de)construction contractors want to implement Circular Economy beyond the boundary of individual projects, then they can use a digital collaboration platform to realise Industrial Symbiosis matchmaking among multiple projects closing resource loops at different scales". CIP extends the scope of circular building project management to explore CE opportunities across multiple project lifecycles. Beyond being a digital tool, CIP represents a new way of managing circular building projects at scale, treating the built environment as an ecosystem where materials of different projects interact, merge, and evolve over space and time.
Overall, the main research contributions of this thesis are twofold. It provides (1) design knowledge of CIP to guide its practical development, implementation, and future evolvement, and (2) theoretical knowledge to advance the theory development of managing circular building projects at scale. By promoting a boundaryless CE, this work paves the pathway towards a new research paradigm of Circular Construction Ecosystems.
