KJ Tait

The Scottish Government have completed a consultation ‘Delivering Scotland’s Circular Economy – A Route Map to 2025 and Beyond’ which aimed to gather views on the Government’s plans to make Scotland a circular economy. There were 7 packages under consultation, each looking at a different area of the economy.

For Package 5 – Embed Circular Construction Practices, the Scottish Government propose new actions to ensure construction practices are circular:

• Work with industry to accelerate the adoption of best practice standards
• Investigate the options to incentivise refurbishment of buildings
• Coordinate a Scottish Programme of reuse of construction materials and assets
• Investigate the potential use of recycling bonds to divert material from landfill
• Consider how devolved taxes can incentivise the use of secondary aggregates and support circular economy practices
• Work with industry to identify ways to reduce soil and stones going to landfill
• Facilitate the development of a soil symbiosis programme.

We recognise that the industry has begun to adopt best practice measures through environmental accreditation such as BREEAM, where Clients are keen to achieve Excellent or Outstanding schemes but also, there is much to do particularly around diverting materials away from landfill sites.

As a company currently working across many refurbishment projects in Scotland, we have seen first hand the potential to improve the performance of our buildings across many metrics including ‘letability’ and energy demand, all significantly reducing the embodied carbon from the development. On some occasions, there will be a requirement to demolish and rebuild, however, we should not see that as the normal.

The Scottish Government consultation closed on 22 August 2022.

https://consult.gov.scot/environment-forestry/scotlands-circular-economy-routemap/