An Integrated Material Flows, Stakeholders and Policies Approach to Identify and Exploit Regional Resource Potentials

Abstract

Material flows in the construction and demolition (C&D) sector remain high in many countries. But, their changes or reductions are essential for successful circular economies. Existing material flow analyses do not cover regional characteristics, stakeholders and impacts of policy measures and interactions.We contribute a new, unprecedented way of integrating regional building and infrastructure material stock and flow modelling with stakeholders, policy measures, their impacts and mutual interactions.Stakeholders are considered with their objectives, influences, interactions, willingness to act, to cooperate or contribute to resource conservation. 31 policy measures are crystallized from literature and evaluated in two surveys regarding their expected impact, their bundling and temporal effects.The integrated bottom-up simulation model was tested for the federal state of Baden-Württemberg (Germany).The results show that until 2030 net stock piling can be expected and secondary raw materials from building stock will be sufficient to supply future recycling concrete production until 2030. Most License: CC-BY-ND-NC 2.0 DE effective policy measures are additional cost/taxes on primary resources, increased disposal fees and curriculae adaption. Bundling these leads to a combined RESPOT of 30.8%. The results are useful for political decision makers, educational institutions, disposal site operators as well as primary and secondary raw material extraction industries.

Material flows and GHG emissions from housing stock evolution in US counties, 2020–60

“…Incorporating vacancy rates that can change over time is an inescapable requirement for modeling building stock evolution in regions with low or negative population growth. This is best achieved at a subnational level in order to incorporate locally specific vacancy rates and population growth prospects (Deilmann et al 2009;Volk et al 2019). As most industrialized and post-industrial nations fit the low-and slowing population growth paradigm, and with declining fertility rates globally (Vollset et al 2020), more explicit consideration of vacancy in housing stock models is increasingly important.…”

“…The role of vacancies, and their influence on building construction, demolition, and material flows, is beginning to receive more attention in building stock models, particularly in regions with declining population and growing vacancy rates (Deilmann et al 2009;Wuyts et al 2020). Areas with high vacancy rates tend to have lower demand for new construction (Volk et al 2019), while areas with low vacancy rates have higher construction demand (Zabel 2016). Improved modeling of construction and demolition considering local population growth and vacancy rates can facilitate more reliable construction and demolition material flow estimates at local levels (Schiller et al 2017b), where reuse of bulky materials is more feasible.…”

“…Schiller et al (2017a) estimate a maximum vacancy threshold to inform their calculation of residential demolition in Germany. Volk et al (2019) use vacancy rates for multifamily buildings to approximate vacancy rates for residential and non-residential buildings in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, and model vacancy increases in response to reduced demand for new floor area, as well as reduced replacement of demolished buildings in regions with higher vacancy. These studies exemplify the evolving treatment of vacancy in building stock models.…”

Implementing circular economy in a regional context: A systematic literature review and a research agenda

“…Data availability issues. The issue of a lack of data and challenges in terms of data availability were encountered in several studies (Tazi et al, 2021;Towa et al, 2021;Towa et al, 2021a;Towa et al, 2021b;D'Adamo et al, 2020;Arbolino et al, 2020;Banias et al, 2020;Bianchi et al, 2020;Gardiner and Hajek, 2020;Mihai and Grozavu, 2019;Patricio et al, 2020;Silvestri et al, 2020;Agovino et al, 2019;Christis et al, 2019;Virtanen et al, 2019;Volk et al, 2019;Arbolino et al, 2018;Avdiushchenko, 2018;Sastre et al, 2018). Arbolino et al (2018) pointed out to the fact that the regional level represents a challenging territorial level for analysis, simply due to dearth of data, which was also corroborated by Bianchi et al (2020) and Towa et al (2021b).…”

How Can Material Stock Studies Assist the Implementation of the Circular Economy in Cities?

“…The authors indicate that a holistic approach to circular cities can find the root causes of many social and environmental problems, but such an approach requires the expertise of various theories. Unsurprisingly, only a few scholars illustrated the advantages of combining industrial ecology methods, like material stock studies with qualitative research informed by political ecology or stakeholder analysis (e.g., refs and ).…”