Business case

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Contribution to social parity, or impact on social disparity

Equality

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

Providing specialist services to support consumers, businesses, andgovernments

Professional Services

Producing building materials and providing services to create residential and non-residential infrastructure and real estate


Construction and Infrastructure

Providing public and private education and support services at any level or for any profession, and governmental and public administration services, including judicial, regulatory, and legislative activities, taxation, defence, public order and safety, immigration services, foreign affairs and the administration of government programmes

Education and Government Services

Activities to clean, decorate, and restore products back to working condition for original or new purposes

Refurbishment, remanufacturing, renovation

Designing products to be reused for the same or different purposes in multiple lifecycles

Design for reuse

Rescue or mine materials or components from buildings for use in new buildings or for processing to be used in other industrial processes.

Salvage components

Make collected and sorted recyclables available for use by citizens, small businesses up to large scale industrial processes. 

Use recyclables

Other

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

 This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant provides support for the collection of data related to debris management and its modeling. Debris is the waste generated by hazardous events such as a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. This is a critical and often overlooked problem. Debris impacts the logistics of humanitarian relief and can generate debris in some large-scale disasters equivalent in volume to years of normal solid waste production in the affected areas. In the context of the Haiti earthquake, blockage of the roads by debris was one of the key factors in the humanitarian organizations inability to deliver aid to the victims in the immediate aftermath, even after aid had arrived at the Port-au-Prince airport and ports. Almost two months after the earthquake, many sources cite debris removal and disposal as one of the biggest challenges going forward and estimate that these activities will take more than five years to complete. Debris removal is a costly and long, complicated process requiring the careful consideration of both short and long term effects.If successful, this research will provide an integrated model that considers interactions between the decision problems in all three phases of debris management operations (clearance, collection, and disposal). These models and decision aid tools will be greatly enhanced through testing and tuning using scenarios based on the collected real data. Existing literature on debris removal is very limited and this work will open new venues both in the modeling and solution of this problem as well as create publicly available data sets for testing. Through data collection, analysis, and documentation of operations a case study describing the effects of debris and its removal on the delivery of humanitarian aid and access to critical facilities in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake will be created. It is envisioned that the developed tools will be used not only in tactical and operational phases but also during the comprehensive policy evaluation phase.Project ReportDebris removal is a costly, long and complicated process requiring the careful consideration of both short term and long term effects on people's health and safety, and the environment. Operations occur over many stages, from the initial clearance of roadways, to coordinating many teams in collecting debris, to the final disposal decisions of the debris. In the short term, the main consideration is the clearance of debris to allow for the transportation of relief resources and access to disaster areas or critical facilities for lifesaving activities. In the long term debris must be collected, sorted, and properly disposed of in as quickly a time as possible. Given that the debris may contain toxic or hazardous waste, not performing the long term goals quickly poses serious health effects on surrounding communities, but even with non-toxic debris, being left uncollected causes a detriment to rebuilding and recovery of the disaster area. One needs to weigh the benefits of rapid debris clearing with the long term impact to ensure that its management would not pose a future threat to human health or the environment. We develop computer tools to aid in the analysis of debris operations and decision making during debris operations. These tools can help stakeholders make more informed decisions, quicker, allowing debris operations to be more effective. On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7 earthquake occurred within 15 miles of Port au Prince, Haiti. The resulting damage was severe as many neighborhoods were almost completely destroyed, the Haitian government lost almost all of its ministries, and many hospitals and other infrastructure facilities were destroyed. Numerous aftershocks of magnitude 4 or 5 have only increased the damage. Estimates range that the number of dead is between 100,000 and 230,000, with as many as 1,000,000 made homeless from an estimated 250,000 destroyed residences. The debris created from the earthquake is estimated to be above 20-25 cubic yards, or enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome around 5 times. We travelled to Port-au-Prince to interview decision makers in debris management to better understand how initial operations occurred and how operations were currently managed. The response of the first few days faced difficulties beyond the capabilities of limited resources. Initial efforts for debris were not well coordinated among the greater response community. This is not unexpected due to the functional collapse of the Haitian government and lack of clearly defined roles. Since then various entities have fallen into various, largely uncoordinated, roles related to debris. We found operations already in the phase of collecting of debris, a phase which could take decades at current rates. A more detailed summary of what we found was published in "Haiti's Eternal Weight," an op-ed in New York Times on July 7, 2010. Since then various attempts have been made to bring these operations into a centrally managed operation. We took a tool we were developing for US disasters and tailored it, based on information collected regarding Port-au-Prince, to the Haiti situation and proposed plans for coordinating debris operations. We focused on analyzing the importance of particular factors within plans as a way to stress what is important for a plan to consider. We demonstrated that ignoring the road network of Port-au-Prince, a city bordered by ocean and mountains, could cause a 19 percent underestimate in how long operations could take. We also demonstrated that the planning of which debris dumping sites and the schedule, with which they are open, can cause an increase of up to 24 percent in time operations will take. This stresses the importance of not only planning where and when debris is collected but also planning in closely in conjunction with the sites the debris must be taken to. The majority of debris in Port-au-Prince is rubble from buildings and other structures. Many Haitians are rebuilding their houses with the debris created by their original house by hand mixing a mortar. Members of the aid community have expressed a varying degree of opinions on the topic, from encouraging larger scale production of brick from reuse of debris to expressing that rebuilding with what collapsed once will lead to structural failure in the future. While in Port-au-Prince we collected many samples of mixes used by those rebuilding in order to test the quality of the mixes and determine when and how it can be properly reused. Using these collected samples we showed how proper reuse of the rubble could effectively create aggregate on par in strength with North American standards.


EcoSur Haiti

UNDP

<p>**Overview** "The overall objective was to investigate the possibility for converting debris into materials for vertical construction, specifically housing Create value chains for debris removal and housing delivery suited for small and/or informal businesses" **Key Takeaways** Create value chains for debris removal and housing delivery in Haiti after the earthquake 2010 There was massive debris after the earthquake and at the same time scarcity of suitable sand and gravel. The underlying idea was to investigate to what extent the debris included cement and lime that had not reacted when originally cast and how much they could be reactivated and add to the quality of future cement based products if used in concrete. **Project Achievements** Although the debris was tested successfully in the laboratory, it was not implemented as the debris was no longer available for use **Project Stakeholders** UNDP commissioned the study, EcoSur network implemented it with specialists from the Cuban Institute "CIDEM" **Main Lessons** We were unable to apply the learnings from the lab due to time running out, slow decision making and some bureaucrazy. **Conclusions of the Study** 1 - The debris can be recycled as aggregate for manufacturing concrete, it is recommend to use water-reducing admixtures. It can be used as masonry mortar 2 - The debris is a good alternative for the manufacture of items such as micro-concrete tiles and ferrocement panels . 3 - The debris can be used in ordinary structural concrete with a characteristic strength of 20.0 MPa. " **Additional Keywords:** Circularity, Construction, Closing-the-loop</p>