The real estate company Home.Earth has brought together several major players in the construction industry within timber construction and innovative building design to build a circular future through two key focus areas.

"The construction industry builds from scratch every time and is less efficient today than it was 50 years ago. By producing off-site and thinking industrially, we can increase both productivity and circularity," says Home.Earth Co-founder Kasper Guldager.

The new circular biogenic building system, where construction is done in prefabricated elements and modules, will be designed to radically reduce the carbon footprint by using a circular building approach with bio-based materials and upcycled products.

Co-founder and Creative Director at EFFEKT, Tue Hesselberg Foged is looking forward to the collaboration: “This partnership provides us with the opportunity to create the necessary innovation to address both the climate crisis and the housing crisis at the same time," he says.

There is only one planet Earth, and with today's requirements in the building regulations, the planetary boundaries are exceeded by a factor of 10. Other than Home.Earth and EFFEKT, the partnership by the name of “Closing Loops” includes a:gain, Scandi Byg and Nordic Wood Industries who will develop, test, and industrialize the new building system together.

Breaking down the silos of construction
The partnership believes that the key to success lies in creating a platform with a tight value chain, where the silos of construction are broken down and replaced with integrated partnerships, built on transparency with open contracts, open economics, and repeated collaborations with mutual trust. Therefore, the EU grant for the project will be used to think across the value chain and develop an industrial approach, thereby paving the way for success in circular construction:

"The advantage of industrializing the construction process is that, in addition to increasing productivity, it is much easier to prioritize building with reuse and easier to eliminate waste because it is easier to systematize in an industrial process. That way, you incorporate the circular mindset into the entire process," says Kasper Guldager.

He continues:

"The goal is that we as a minimum develop a complete building system up to six stories in height with less than 4 kg/CO2/m2/year, where 90% of all materials can be reused at high value. But our ambition reaches much further than that. We aim to go well below the 4 kg. mark and achieve planetary sustainability, where we do not use more resources than the planet provides".

Closing the Loop is realized together with We Build Denmark, the Board of Danish Business Promotion, and is co-financed by the European Union.