About us
What is it
Reuse
Key objective
Developement
- Objectives
- Impacts
- Demonstrate value and profitability
- Develop a scalable profitable business model
- Develop technology and digital tools enabling the integration of the supply chain
- Ensure safety and healthiness
- Demonstrate potential and mitigate social and legal barriers
- Share knowledge
- Unlock unexploited or underexploited raw materials and improve circularity, close material cycles
- Improve economic viability, market potential and value creation
- Improve health, safety and environmental performance
- Improve material and value recovery rate via wider application of smart techniques and procedures
- Push EU to the forefront of technology though generated know-how
- ReCreate contributes to several of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): SDG 9 (Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation), SDG 11 (Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable), SDG 13 (Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts)
Why
The production of cement alone is accountable for 5–8 % of annual carbon emissions globally. Reusing precast concrete can reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint of single elements by 93-98%. Construction and demolition waste is the single most significant source of waste in the EU, subject to a 70 % recovery target under the Waste Framework Directive. This project develops the transition towards circular construction by investigating the systemic changes needed in the whole ecosystems of construction and demolition.
Have a question?
Research shows that by reusing concrete components the carbon footprint and energy consumption of the product phase can be reduced drastically by up to 93–98% compared to virgin production or aggregate recycling.
The main objective of the ReCreate project is to close the loop for concrete at the highest level of utilization by facilitating the deconstruction and reuse of precast structural components.
The aim of this project is to improve the technical and economic viability of deconstruction of precast concrete structures that have not been designed for deconstruction. The main objective is to pilot deconstruction and reuse towards maturity as a socio-technical system. The project develops the transition towards circular construction by investigating the systemic changes needed in the whole ecosystems of construction and demolition.
ReCreate will facilitate the generation of novel significant technology-based circular economy innovation businesses originating from radical innovations and incremental improvements, which together enable scaling up the sustainable recovery and processing for reuse and thus strengthen the competitiveness of the European raw materials industries as well as increasing service industries. To this end, the ReCreate consortium includes outstanding partners e.g. the world leading prefabricated building company, Skanska, and the market leader of precast concrete in Europe, Consolis, and building owners with vested interest and a project pipeline leveraging the ReCreate resources
Goals
Importance
Earlier, isolated experiments in the pilot countries have shown that reuse can be viable in optimal conditions, but there are major obstacles with the technology, acceptability, supply chain integration, economics and the lack of circular construction business models.
Localization is an important aspect of the project, as the operational environment is framed by local border conditions (e.g. industry structures, building norms, construction techniques). Due to the significant stocks of precast buildings in the Baltic and Balkan regions, the knowledge sharing, dissemination and communication activities of ReCreate are targeted, in addition to the piloting countries, particularly to Eastern EU member states.
Funding Programme
ReCreate is funded by Horizon 2020, the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020). ReCreate is the action under the topic of: Raw materials innovation for the circular economy: sustainable processing, reuse, recycling and recovery schemes.
