What goes around, comes around

To facilitate the move to a more circular economy, the European Commission put forward a Circular Economy Package in December 2015, which includes revised legislative proposals to enable industries to become more efficient with resources. Amongst other initiatives, the package promotes the efficient use of bio-based products, to ensure the best value is realised from cascading uses through their lifecycle. So will this mean promoting the use of more timber and a ‘wood first’ policy?

If we look at the journey of timber from being felled to end of life, there are numerous opportunities for value creation and retention. However, all too often, good quality timber is diverted into the wood fuel and biomass markets before these opportunities are realised.

We need to identify timber for higher value purposes early on. For softwood, this would mean identifying the strongest timber in the mill and diverting this for structural use and glulam or cross laminated timber (CLT) production. For hardwood, it’s identifying the trees in the forest that would make good quality saw logs, extracting these before they get into the wood fuel chain.

Once timber becomes a higher value product, we have more chance of keeping it in the ‘technical’ cycle for longer. For example hardwood used for high quality furniture remains in use far longer than lower quality chipboard furniture, and has a higher potential for reuse. CLT panels could be designed for reuse and remanufacture in a component based construction system, likewise glulam beams could be designed for reuse, or remanufactured into new (shorter) beams. This cycle also ensures the captured CO2 remains locked up in the timber for a much longer period. Only once the reuse and remanufacture cycles have been exhausted, should the material be sent for recycling into products such as particleboard, and only at the end of that cycle should the product finally swap back to the biological cycle and succumb to cascading through to energy recovery and biological composition.

However to make this system work we need new business models to ensure high quality products can be recovered at end of service life. Where the product manufacturer has designed a product to be disassembled and reused, they should retain ownership of the product, and ensure logistics allow economical recovery. This could be through a long term lease agreement, or a service agreement.

It will require a number of factors to come together for this system to work. Manufacturers will need to design products with business models that promote reuse and remanufacture. For construction products, contractors need to be ready to deliver new business models, working closely with the manufacturers. The design community will need to incorporate circular products within their designs in the right way, to allow for easy disassembly and recovery.

Most importantly, the client needs to be willing to accept these changes, and start asking ‘how circular is my product?’