Jessica Bradley examines how traditional construction must evolve to design and build infrastructure for a circular economy transition.
The built environment has a big role to play in addressing the challenge of the climate emergency, not least because the design of buildings and infrastructure can optimise the types of materials that will be locked away for decades.
Extracting, manufacturing and producing materials generates around 45% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and moving to renewables can only address half of these emissions.
This is where the circular economy should step in; however, between 1970 and 2017, the annual global extraction of materials grew from around 27 billion tonnes to 92 billion tonnes, with only around 8.6% of all materials used being cycled back into use.
The design of infrastructure determines its longevity and the overall needs for materials through the lifecycle. As such, infrastructure is a huge component of the circular economy and its logistics, including waste management, material storage and redistribution, modular construction facilities and adaptive reuse of existing buildings.
But how, exactly, can infrastructure be designed for circularity from the outset?
Out with the old
Continuing to work towards net zero carbon for the lifecycle of buildings requires changing approaches to design, material selection and use, experts argue.
Circular principles can be embedded into infrastructure planning and delivery by moving beyond traditional construction models and toward systems that prioritise longevity, adaptability, material transparency and whole-life value.
Traditional infrastructure models are incompatible with circular ambitions for numerous reasons, including supply chain vulnerability – a growing issue for contractors and developers.
Relying on virgin materials makes the sector vulnerable to price fluctuations, whereas circular procurement, material recovery infrastructure and local reuse networks can reduce these risks by shortening supply chains and keeping material value local.
What does circular infrastructure look like?
Moving beyond traditional infrastructure models is a relatively modest job, says Paul Ekins, professor of resources and environmental policy at UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources and deputy chair of the Circular Economy Taskforce.
“Circularity is basically keeping materials in circulation for longer, which is to do with design,” he says. “So many of the characteristics of materials that will allow them to stay in circulation are decided at the design stage, and you don’t need huge infrastructure for that.”
When designing circular infrastructure, the aim is to source fewer and better quality raw materials and to use resources to favour positive environmental and social outcomes.
Circular infrastructure also includes modifying existing infrastructure to achieve greater resource efficiency, says sustainability assessment method BREEAM, as well as designing infrastructure assets for material recovery, adaptability and lifecycle optimisation, using principles of reversible design and design for disassembly/deconstruction.
BREEAM emphasises the provision of digital information on construction products, including material passports, to improve access to material and component data to help facilitate reuse and recycling.
Material passports record details of the installation, which can help with the maintenance and dismantling of a building. Alongside this, materials banks will also form a significant piece of the puzzle, experts say. However, it’s argued that the lack of standardisation for the management of material banks is a hurdle.
There are many distinctions between buildings and infrastructure, and while with buildings, you can look to reuse materials, infrastructure is usually quite specific.
This means it’s important to maintain infrastructure properly, says Catherine De Wolf, assistant professor at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zürich.
“A lot of infrastructure needs demolishing because it didn’t get maintained properly, so we have to look at how do we monitor infrastructure to repair and replace things on time,” she says.
This is referred to as ‘slowing the loop’ – a circular strategy that allows infrastructure to be in use for longer.
Several other circular strategies can be used for infrastructure, including ‘narrowing the loop’, which uses fewer materials to build something, and regenerating the loop, which means building something that improves the environment, by using carbon-capturing materials, for example.
However, while there is a lot of research being done on these strategies, there is a lack of drawing on this research, De Wolf says.
“I’m not sure how much, in practice, these experts are listened to,” says De Wolf.
The answer, she says, is collaborations between policymakers and researchers.
“Lifecycle assessments are such a complex topic, and there’s a lot of greenwashing from companies,” she says. “To be sure you’re really doing something better for the environment, it’s good to work with academic researchers.”
“But it’s also the job of researchers to reach out to practice and policymakers, to disseminate research outside of academic papers.”
In this vein, De Wolf has set up DICE Lab, a knowledge-sharing platform for connecting researchers to practice for the transition to the circular economy and digitalisation.
Enablers of circular infrastructure
Taking advantage of the opportunities for infrastructure in a circular economy will require significant global systemic change and technological innovation, the Global Infrastructure Hub believes.
In a thought piece, it argues that policymakers can drive the transition to the circular economy by forming a common strategy with objectives that drive policy, regulation, procurement and financing of infrastructure.
More locally, town and land use planning can also play a role in promoting circular building, via circular public procurement models, by enabling circular economy principles in construction and defining material solutions, argues European climate agency Climate KIC.
In March 2025, the then-climate secretary, Steve Reed, said the UK needs long-term direction on how regulation will develop to support the transition to a circular economy. This is required, he says, to build the infrastructure needed, including for clean energy.
Edkins visited car manufacturer JLR last year, and heard how it was now optimising the disassembly of vehicles at the end of their life to reuse the parts, after spending 40 years optimising the assembly of vehicles from component parts.
“I think we’re going to see much more of that if the government puts in the right incentives and regulations,” he says.
Barriers and risks
There are many commercial risks and barriers to implementing circular principles. One reason manufacturers and other businesses are slow to take up circular economy principles is because they can’t yet make a profit from it, says Edkins.
“Subsidy has some role to play in building up infrastructure,” he says. “But once the infrastructure is there and a company still can’t remain financially viable, it will close, which is precisely what we’re seeing with plastic recycling facilities.”
The lack of economic incentives is making it increasingly difficult for companies to pursue circular principles, even where the ambition is there, says Anika Buchmaier, senior consultant at Buro Happold.
“There needs to be a rethink around the value of reused materials,” says Buchmaier, who has heard discussions among experts about how the value of new material should be lower than reused materials.
However, because infrastructure is often publicly owned, the short-termism of politics is often a barrier to long-term thinking around circularity, De Wolf says.
“Usually, politicians are elected every four to five years, and the repair of a bridge is not as exciting to get people to vote for you as building a new bridge. Sometimes, political interests aren’t aligned with circular interests.”
There are also several practical difficulties faced by developers wanting to incorporate used materials, Buchmaier says.
London has opened a couple of urban mining hubs – where materials can be recovered and reintroduced into the supply chain, including Marks Barfield Architects’ Urban Mining Tondo, which stores dismantled reusable materials from buildings in municipal material centres.
But not having enough of these hubs is a challenge, because there might be a wide span of time between deconstruction and reusing materials, says Buchmaier.
“Often, there’s no space for a developer wanting to store materials from something they’ve deconstructed,” she says.
There are also barriers to gaining warranties for used materials, says Kitty Walker, senior façade engineer at Buro Happold.
“You might want to build something with a 20-year warranty, but it may be that financers or clients are less likely to warranty something with unknowns,” she says.
“They might not see the point in taking that risk without knowing the material. It’s about giving clients more confidence with case studies, and doing more testing.”
What must happen next?
Recycling facilities are the biggest kind of new infrastructure we’ll need in the journey towards a circular economy, Edkins says.
“We’ll need material refurbishment facilities that enable the recovery of a wider group of materials in a far less polluted way, so that these materials can be reused and turned into good quality recyclates,” he says.
In the waste sector, there are some examples of good practice demonstrating how companies can rethink their approach to materials. The Suez plant in Manchester, Edkins says, has been logging where materials have come from for years, and has designed a programme of separating and reusing materials.
“It’s an evolution from what one thinks of as the normal activities of a waste management company,” he says.
More broadly, progressing circular economy principles to infrastructure in the UK will rely on framing it as an economic argument, Edkins says.
“A lot of work has been done on the circular economy taskforce to look at the extent to which handling these materials in a more circular way makes economic sense,” he says.
“Studies suggest that increases to GDP can come about from more circular handling of materials. The balance of evidence is that it’s positive for the economy, and can build more resilient supply chains.”
However, reforming the material basis of the economy will take a long time, Ekins adds.
“It’s only been around 10 years since circularity ideas were being seriously proposed and promulgated by policymakers,” he says. “But we’ve got to go further, and the incentives aren’t yet strong enough.”
Buchmaier is starting to see more start-ups focused on circularity, which she says are building with mycelium and other natural materials.
“There are a lot more conversations in this space now, and more interest in designing for circularity,” she says.
