Review
Version 1
Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed
A Review of Europe's Circular Economy in the Building Sector
Version 1
: Received: 11 September 2022 / Approved: 13 September 2022 / Online: 13 September 2022 (10:04:31 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Mrad, C.; Frölén Ribeiro, L. A Review of Europe’s Circular Economy in the Building Sector. Sustainability 2022, 14, 14211. Mrad, C.; Frölén Ribeiro, L. A Review of Europe’s Circular Economy in the Building Sector. Sustainability 2022, 14, 14211.
Abstract
This article evaluates Europe's building sector's circular economy (CE). This industry is respon-sible for 42% of energy consumption, more than 50% of extracted materials, 30% of Europe's wa-ter and waste generation, and 35% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This study focuses on peer-reviewed articles from Scopus and Web of Science databases. Of the first 1750 publications, 2.9% were eligible for a full-text reading and analysis. Most of the trending studies, 92%, pro-mote the circular economy concept through construction materials rather than analyzing the im-pact of the construction sector on the environment and finding solutions for better implementa-tion, and 41% promote recycling and reuse as the only options. New Design solutions are in 12% of the studies, six-fold more than Law and Legislation, only 2%. Finding an optimal combination of assessing the life cycle of buildings and components and searching for different ways of man-aging the Construction and Demolition Waste at end-of-life is between 33% and 39%. Ultimately, one evaluated CE proposed frameworks for the building industry based on 10R principles varia-tions. One presents an alternative framework for a circular strategy for the building industry that focuses on Upcycling, replacing the Recover principle.
Keywords
Keywords: Circular economy; building sector; Europe
Subject
Engineering, Civil Engineering
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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