Title : Integrated, circular, and digitally supported sustainable solutions for waste minimization and carbon Storage in buildings and the construction sector
Acronym : WOODCIRCLES
Funding program : Horizon Europe
Topic: HORIZON-CL6-2022-CIRCBIO-02-01-two-stage
Type of Project : Applied research and innovation/implementation
Project Code : 101082184-2
Project budget : 8 918 562.50 EUR
Lead Applicant : Danish Technological Institute
Project duration : 48 months (01.06.2023 – 31.05.2027)
The project in brief
The construction sector is responsible for over 35% of the EU’s total waste generation, and accounts for about 50% of all extracted resources and an estimated at 5-12% of total GHG emissions. WOODCIRCLES will contribute significantly to decreasing these numbers by developing innovative circular solutions for sustainable wood construction to help reduce Europe’s dependence on non-renewable resources, cut GHG emissions, reduce waste generation, and offer long-term carbon sinks and substitution of fossil-based and carbon-intensive products.
The consortium will develop new value-added value chains for upcycling of wood waste materials and optimized design-for-disassembly building system solutions to significantly increase recycling rates of wood in construction. An ‘Urban Sawmill’ sorting and production facility capable of turning in-homogenous low value wood construction waste into a standardized homogenous value-added, cost-effective baseline product, will be prototyped.
WOODCIRCLES will integrate digital tools and solutions in all developments and create digital twins for the large-scale, real-life demonstrators – the Urban Sawmill and the building system prototypes to demonstrate the benefits of digital technology for circular construction.
WHAT DO WE DO?
The activities of Pillar 3 – city engagement and piloting (WP6) will be led by URBASOFIA and will focus on deployment of locally adapted WOODCIRCLES solutions, involving cities and local stakeholder clusters in ROTTERDAM, TARTU and TORINO to integrate novel methods for wood waste material identification and sorting, traceability and circularity (Digital Twin, BIM) and sorting, manufacture and disassembly and new prototype buildings, as well as new governance models for strengthening the local / regional secondary material markets.
To ensure European-wide impact, with the involvement of all partners, we will also develop a WOODCIRCLES Methodology and Toolkit, containing co-developed solutions and strategic options to tackle regulatory, planning and value chain bottlenecks in operating the circular wood infrastructure, ensuring: (i) sustainability and upscaling of the developed infrastructure at the pilot level; (ii) replication options/requirements for other relevant cities.
Consortium
