The ReCreate Final Conference took place online on 23 September 2026. Over three hours, the project partners showed what came out of five years of work on reusing precast concrete elements. They also discussed what still has to change for reuse to become normal practice. The conference was organised by GBC Croatia and brought together 155 participants from 26 countries.
Why reuse?
Project coordinator Satu Huuhka (Tampere University) opened by setting the scale of the problem. Human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass on Earth. Cement alone is the third-largest source of human-made CO₂ emissions. ReCreate’s answer is to treat existing precast concrete buildings as a source of building elements, not as waste to be crushed.
What ReCreate developed
The first panel, moderated by Ena Luketić (GBC Croatia), followed a single concrete element on its journey. It starts in the donor building, goes into a database and through quality checks, and ends up in a new design. Each panelist led one step of that journey in ReCreate:
- Simon Wijte (TU/e) on deconstruction
- Kjartan Gudmundsson (KTH) on digital tools and tracking
- Jukka Lahdensivu (TAU) on quality assurance
- Patrick Teuffel (CSD) on redesign and reassembly
Four countries, four demonstrator stories
- Finland: Inari Weijo (Ramboll Finland) and Eric Rawlins (LIIKE) presented the Finnish cluster. About 260 elements were salvaged from a 1982 office building in 2023. They were then reused in four pilots: two residential buildings, an industrial building and the Sammonkatu exhibition pavilion in Tampere. The pavilion was built in 2026 from 30 columns, 6 beams and 5 hollow core slabs.
- Sweden: Helena Westerlind (KTH) presented the Swedish pilots, including the H22 exhibition pavilion.
- The Netherlands: Sebastiaan van Hellenberg Hubar (IMd) presented the Circular Centre Netherlands office building. It is built from elements of the deconstructed Prinsenhof building in Arnhem. The main lessons were that the elements have to sit at the centre of the design, and that it pays to keep things simple, because every adjustment adds cost. A full-size mock-up was used to test the structural design, the tolerances and the connections.
- Germany: Jakob Fischer (BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg) presented the extension of the Kolkwitz sports club, built with 80 elements from a donor building about 40 km away. He also presented the youth centre in Hohenmölsen, which will reuse 484 elements. It is set to become the largest reuse project with precast concrete elements in Germany.
Cross-cutting lessons
The second panel stepped back from the individual pilots. It asked what holds true across all of them, once the technical side is solved. The topics were:
- business models and value chains (Leena Aarikka-Stenroos, TAU)
- policy, legal, social and organisational conditions (Paul Jonker-Hoffrén, TAU)
- architecture, design and acceptance (Erik Stenberg, KTH)
- the project-wide synthesis (Satu Huuhka)
From pilots to wider practice
Lauri Alkki and Eetu Lehmusvaara (TAU) summed up the key lesson: reuse is technically feasible, but it challenges existing processes and project logics.
The main bottlenecks they identified are:
- quality assurance, permitting, certification and liability are not yet standardised
- demand is weak and fragmented
- costs and risks are unevenly distributed along the value chain
To guide the way forward, ReCreate developed a roadmap built on five developments:
- reuse becomes financially competitive
- new partnerships form around element reuse
- digital solutions support reuse
- circularity becomes a core design principle
- new professional competences emerge
An engaged audience
Participants kept the Q&A and chat busy all afternoon. Questions covered element refurbishment, connections, storage hubs, insurance, design for disassembly and whole-life carbon.
Missed it? Watch the recording
The full conference recording is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnaJS6lShxo
The reports mentioned during the conference are available in the Resources section of this website.
Thank you to all speakers, partners and participants who joined us!
