Environment and sustainability: together towards a circular economy

In the design phase, the focus is on Rethink, Reduce, and Refuse. It would make a huge difference if consumers decided to stop buying disposable goods. This would make it more interesting for producers to engage in circular business and to produce products that are in line with the principles of the circular economy.

In the use phase, the focus is on Re-use, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, and Repurpose. Is it possible to repair or reuse old products? And what other options are there to extend the life of a product or raw material?

And here, as a final step, is where Recycle comes in. But in order to recycle products better, it helps if producers take this into account during production. And that is the design phase again, the first step, which brings us full circle.

It isn’t easy to estimate the future environmental impact of innovations in construction. There is a great deal involved. With the Next Generation Impact Assessment, we offer companies the opportunity to gain an impression of the CO2 reduction that building innovations can deliver.

Tropomi maps out air quality and greenhouse gases worldwide. We combine the large-scale data from these and other satellites with sensor networks at a much lower resolution level. We interpret the various data and align the models. This allows us to zoom in so far that the government, or an individual citizen, can see the air quality at street level.

We are clearly only at the beginning of the possibilities regarding the processing and proper recycling of raw materials. We must ensure that we make much better use of the billions of kilos of raw materials that the manufacturing industry processes every year after use. Read more in our interview with MetaalNieuws: ‘Toeleverancier moet proactief inspelen op circulariteit’.

If you want to reuse solid wood, it may take some effort, but it’s not rocket science. And using the fibres of waste wood to make sheet material doesn't have to be complicated either. But we are looking a step further and are currently also researching what you can do with cellulose and lignin.

What do we do with the plastic flows for which mechanical or chemical recycling is too expensive? We have a clear answer to that question: thermochemical recycling. Using this method, we extract usable raw materials from mixed and contaminated plastic flows at high temperatures.