Industrial Decarbonisation: Circular Construction Practices

The construction industry is known for its significant environmental footprint, marked by its major contribution to the depletion of natural resources, extensive energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollution, environmental degradation, and global warming. The adoption of the circular economy (CE) within the construction industry holds promise in mitigating these adverse impacts. CE represents a departure from the wastefulness inherent in the current linear economic model, aiming to establish a closed-loop system across the value chain. G20 India 2023 has launched an industry-led coalition on resource efficiency and CE to facilitate knowledge-sharing, best practices, and sustainable approaches among participating industries. The OECD (2021) has identified key actions for G20 members including promoting resource efficiency throughout the product lifecycle, aligning sectoral policies with resource efficiency goals, strengthening policy development through enhanced data, and fostering international cooperation. While two policy briefs from Think 20 (Augustina et al., 2020; Anbumozhi et al., 2021) addressed CE, they did not specifically focus on construction sector-specific strategies. This policy brief outlines key cost-effective actions that the construction industry can adopt today, which G20 nations can choose to promote within their economies and beyond. These evidence-based policy recommendations incorporate stakeholder perspectives on the costs and benefits of CE implementation in construction. They incorporate waste hierarchy principles such as the 3-R (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) for finding effective actions while using empirical methods to analyze data. This brief provides proven cost-effective solutions for G20, highlighting circularity in building renovation and construction processes.