Paper info

Recycling in the city: mobilising resources in initiating a circular economy in the construction sector

Lena Bygballe , Bente Flygansvaer and Debbie Harrison

The paper was published at the 35th IMP-conference in Paris, France in 2019.

In this paper, we address how a circular economy can be initiated and designed through the mobilisation of resources between public and private actors. Specifically, we investigate the nature of resource interfaces and circular resource use in a construction setting. The construction sector is known as the “40%” sector: it accounts for 40% of global energy consumption and 25-40% of global carbon emissions. We also know that the industry generates a large amount of waste. The paper centres on an on-going public-private circular economy initiative in Oslo, regarding the cleaning and recycling of masses from and in construction projects. The initiative is localised with the goal to make Oslo entirely self-sufficient in terms of one key construction waste product: masse. We take a resource lens to analyse the imagined and actual resource interaction between business and non-business actors as a city-based ‘ecosystem’ is developed. We question (i) what happens to current understandings of resource interfaces when applied to a circular economy model (a shift from linear to butterfly resource combining), and (ii) the roles played by different business and non-business actors in designing and creating resource interfaces.