BAM’s Nitesh Magdani on squaring the Circular Economy.
In the past few years, the construction industry has been responding to government calls to deliver projects at 15-20% lower out-turn costs, to use BIM more and to become more efficient, which I think has actually had a positive effect on how we go about our business. Construction is like Formula 1 – when you have rule changes on a year-by-year basis, there are fears that the sport will just become more rule-bound and boring. Actually, I believe it makes people work harder to innovate more.
We are very proud to have become the first construction company in the world to join the “Circular Economy 100”, an initiative of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It’s a three-year programme under which businesses and organisations undertake to adopt a cradle to cradle philosophy, where products and systems are designed for recycling, re-use or take-back, and there’s also a shift from customers “consuming” products to buying a functional service.
"In construction, we design, procure, dispose of and send to landfill – the so-called linear model. But in the circular model, should we be designing things that can be re-used? Making arrangements with manufacturers and suppliers to act as service providers?"
Nitesh Magdani
We’re trying to make that work in our business and commercialising it as an offer to clients. In construction, we design, procure, dispose of and send to landfill – the so-called linear model. But in the circular model, should we be designing things that can be re-used? Making arrangements with manufacturers and suppliers to act as service providers?
That involves looking at the idea of paying for performance. Why are we specifying a floor finish to last for 10 or 20 years, when the client will probably have changed their mind and want a design refresh after three or four? So could we have an agreement with the supplier that they’ll take it back, or recycle it? As a contractor, we would guarantee the performance – that the client will always have a good quality floor finish – and they would pay for the performance over the period they want it. It’s about thinking about a building as a performance concept, rather than an ownership concept.
There’s a lot of waste if a client changes their mind once they occupy a building. So if they want something for five years, we would make sure they’re getting it for five years… as long as we’re designing in the future use of the materials, components and products from the beginning.
This concept reflects trends happening elsewhere in our lives, for instance we all upgrade our mobile phones every year or 18 months. Technology has improved at such a pace that we buy something and it’s already out of date. In most cases we dispose of a phone (for a newer model) before its true end of life. Buildings are far more complex products made up of thousands of materials (all with differing life spans) – we need clients to realise that their decisions during their occupation of a building could lead to a lot of waste, unless carefully managed in the first place.
We are already working with major suppliers and subcontractors on reducing waste on site. For example, Dulux gives us loads of 25 litre cans that end up going to landfill, so why not give us a refillable container, and any surplus goes back to the manufacturer for re-use?
The Circular Economy is a further development on that, it’s about reducing waste as a “product” of construction and creating performance-related agreements with each of our suppliers, so that Dulux or British Gypsum, for example, have a requirement to service or replace the product over the lifetime of the building.
We are still at the start of this journey, although BAM has recently completed a building in the Netherlands where the client’s requirement was that they only wanted it for 15 years. This approach is already becoming embedded in BAM’s mind-sets and a key driver for our global business.
Nitesh Magdani RIBA ARB is director of sustainability at BAM Construct UK
