Circular Building Installations: An Introduction

Prof.dr.ir. Atze Boerstra is head of the chair of Building Services Innovation at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. In this video, he discusses the current challenges of making building installations more circular.

• The majority of our building service systems are still designed, refurbished, maintained and/ or operated with just three things in mind: energy use, comfort requirements and costs. At the moment, the fact that building installations are metal-intensive is not equally considered. If one calculates the ‘embodied environmental impact’ related to the metals used in these systems, like for instance, steel, chrome, nickel, copper, one finds that sometimes more than 25% of the total environmental impact of a building can be attributed to its electrical and mechanical systems.
• Transforming the installations sector is challenging: both because remanufactured service systems run the risk of non-compliance with current standards and therefore may be subject to liability, and also because newly produced components are likely to be way more energy efficient than older ones.
• Current research is looking in technology innovations, but also business models and new contract types.