Advancing Sustainable Circularity for Eco-friendly Net-zero Developments

The mission is clear: We must have a common direction towards absolute sustainability!

To pursue this goal, we work together across the border and in parallel within three research areas:

• EXISTING BUILDINGS can be viewed as material banks, but there are no established methods for assessing the balance of the account. We will therefore work with mapping of buildings and materials as well as risk-based decision support to decide whether buildings should be dismantled or preserved. This can assess whether renovation or conversion to other uses is better than reusing materials and components.
• NEW BUILDINGS must be constructed from renewable materials and in such a manner that they can contribute to future reuse. Modular timber construction has great potential here. We therefore uncover the construction industry's current approach with a focus on identifying opportunities for better material utilization and reuse of materials in modules, just as we work with principles for disassembly and adaptation of modules.
• MATERIALS AND COMPONENTS must allow safe deconstruction and their quality must be known for them to be optimally reused. We will therefore work with techniques for safe deconstruction of buildings as well as classification methods, where the quality of reused materials and components is determined through non-destructive testing methods.

Our research team consists of leading experts in three disciplines of Civil and Architectural Engineering: Structural Engineering, Building Science, and Construction management. But we cannot do it alone. Hence, we invite private as well as public stakeholders in the building sector to contact us for collaboration. Please reach out to us if you have ideas, cases, problems, or just a genuine interest regarding the green transition of the construction sector.

Keep yourself updated about our activities via the ASCEND website at LinkedIn.

See the project ASCEND at the Website of Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak.