Should You Dust or Vacuum First?

It’s worth stressing again that standardisation in construction is not a negative, and it’s not unique to platform design either.

Where materials can be reused, these should be considered for reuse on the same or a local site, thereby reducing material miles and facilitating a more sustainable construction process.Although the circular economy market is in its infancy, by considering material reuse during the earliest design stages we can help build that marketplace.

In time, this market will help to further reduce material costs..Following through the circular economy idea to the end of a building’s life, simple design choices allow new materials to be reused at that stage.Using reversable joints for steelwork connections so that beams and columns can be disassembled in their primary form, allows them to be re-used rather than be melted down and recycled as a raw material.

Intumescent paint has to be manually chipped off steelwork before it can be recycled or reused, so choosing to use boarding for fire protection is a better sustainable design choice.These decisions have little cost impact when they are integrated into the building’s design, but can help create – and sustain – the circular economy..

Extending a building’s life, or giving it a second life through refurbishment, reduces the need to use yet more building materials for its replacement.

Designing adaptable buildings enables the function to change depending on its users’ needs.This will mean that applicants will share with the local planning authority only as much as is actually needed.

Unlike the 2D plans and PDF documents currently in use, BIM and digital technology enable applicants to segment their designs, making this possible and less prone to mistakes.. Ricketts says that next steps will revolve around using the Gateway One process that’s come out of the Hackitt Report and the Building Safety Bill, and will involve extracting and digitising important fire safety information from architecture and engineering models.The Building Safety Bill specifies that information must be held securely on a digital platform, and it’s much more sensible to start doing it now, rather than having to catch up later once it’s all gone through the paper-based planning system.

The importance, value and scalability of digitising these building safety processes will be evident to everyone..Sharing data for a better future.