Our Thrive team promotes sustainability in design and supports the delivery of projects that seek to mitigate climate and ecological breakdown and improve our health and wellbeing. Team members offer thought leadership and supporting services relating to sustainable and regenerative design, promoting solutions to drive down the impact of the construction industry in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Chetwoods’ own sustainable design drivers.

Johanna Moro, a member of the Thrive team who specialises in Carbon Modelling, has co-authored a new report by ACAN on Circular Economy in the Built Environment. ACAN is a voluntary network of individuals from within architecture and the wider industry who are addressing the way our built environment is made, operated, and renewed in response to the changing environment.

The ACAN Circular Economy Group has been focusing on how circular economy principles can be applied within the context of the UK construction industry. Over the last few years, the Circular Economy Group ran the Circular Series that discussed in detail how to incorporate circularity within UK construction in a meaningful way. The series addressed the key challenges and opportunities of realising Circular Economy approaches at each of the seven RIBA stages of the design, construction and use of buildings, and proposed an additional Stage Eight to address a building’s end of life.

At the end of the series, the Circular Economy group decided that it would create a design guide to provide practical guidance to design teams about actions that they can currently take within the scope of their work to move towards a circular built environment.

The new guide is based around the three fundamental Circular Economy principles of Maximise Reuse, Design for Optimisation and Minimise Waste. It also discusses further opportunities for improvement which are currently outside the scope of the design team, with the aim of pushing the industry to overcome these obstacles by implementing the new standards, best practice and legislation that are crucial if we want to realise a circular built environment in the years to come.

The Circular Economy

Circular Economy exploration is also key to our philosophy at Chetwoods. As a firm we are currently exploring Circular Economy principles in a ground breaking initiative spearheaded by our Chairman Laurie Chetwood. The project in Surrey encompasses art, architecture, landscape, and emotional response to design in an exemplar of new Circular Living. The design, development and eventual use of the site will be utilised as a test bed and showcase for sustainable design and construction technologies and processes during its entire lifecycle from initial design and development to eventual use. Read more about this project here.

This project stands out for its unique approach to digitally redefining the Circular Economy into a holistic circular lifestyle. By combining existing technologies in novel ways, it is championing a more sustainable and circular way of living. It has already earned recognition, winning the prestigious Best Digital Transformation award at the Digital Construction Live Awards and has also been shortlisted for the AJ100 Innovation of the Year award and the London Construction Awards Technological Innovation of the Year.

Click here to download ACAN's Circular Economy report.