Demonstration of a Circular Building Process at Large Scale: Circboost Pilot Project in Norway

Concrete and construction sector are one of the biggest polluters on a global scale, generating excessive amounts of CO2 emissions and waste. One of the solutions that would alleviate this problem is implementation of circular construction process enabling efficient and low-carbon application of construction and demolition waste. Circular construction, as a pathway of circular economy, supports sustainability by lowering the carbon emissions, transportation needs, use of virgin materials, and landfilling of the waste. This paper demonstrates a circular building process at large scale following the example of the CircBoost Pilot project in Norway. The Norwegian Pilot is one of five that are developed within CircBoost, that deals with the selective demolition of an old slaughterhouse building, production of recycled concrete aggregate, and finally construction of the new museum building built predominantly with secondary raw materials including recycled concrete aggregates in Sortland municipality. This paper shows all stages of the circular building process and the administrative and technical aspects that are involved in the pre-demolition activities including the regular environmental mapping of the demolition structure and extensive concrete quality assessment via Schmidt hammer and core drill sampling, selective demolition using innovative methods, production of high-quality recycled concrete aggregates, and construction of the new structure with recycled concrete and other reused/recycled elements.