Norway has a large construction sector which accounts for the biggest resource footprint (43 million tonnes). However, valuable construction and demolition waste is largely not utilised through reuse or recycling. In this way, circularity is not only low due to a lack of cycling, but also because of the continued build-up of stock in buildings and infrastructure, which bloats the already swollen national material footprint, per capita. According to figures from Statistics Norway, 80,000 tonnes of plaster waste is created each year – and at the same time new plaster is bought and imported from abroad.

The factory collects cast waste (often from demolition companies), take use of brand new technology within plaster recycling and re-sell the recycled cast to manufacturers. The technology has been crucial in order to be able to deliver high quality material to their buyers/ manufacturers, such as Norgips. In this case, the powder produced is 99.5 per cent pure so that it can be converted into new plaster boards.

In principle plaster is forever recyclable and through the localized plaster recycling plant, the recycled cast replaces the virgin raw material that traditionally has been imported from Europe. This helps to reduce the climate emissions associated with the transport of raw materials and reduces costs. This is more importantly, the perfect circular example, because it ensures that the quality of the material does not decline after each use cycle – which allows for an (in theory) eternal source of material, without having to use virgin material.

NG states that cooperation in the value chain was absolutely crucial in order to initiate the circular plaster factory. They managed to create a moment where the entire value chain “jumped” at the same time. For the solution to work on an industrial level, they say that they were dependent on the plaster waste collectors (often companies working with demolition of buildings) willingness to send the plaster to them as opposed to a landfill, and similarly they were also completely dependent on producers/buyers who saw the value of a recycled input.