Hey Reader, In June 2019 I attended a talk in Leuven. I had just moved to Belgium six months earlier. My Flemish was not great, but I went anyway. The ZIN project was presented that evening. A massive office complex in the Brussels North district. The architect explained what they were going to do: not demolish and rebuild from scratch, but treat the existing towers as a material bank. The concrete would be crushed and reused. Ninety percent of the materials would stay in the loop somehow....
13 days ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader, I just came back from a training on nature-inclusivity in construction. Spend a full day at TU Eindhoven with great input from the project partners of the Interreg project “natuur-inbouw”. We also got a tour over the campus where we saw more than 150 building-integrated nestboxes. The same week I saw the five shortlisted designs for a competition in Rotterdam that finally triggered me to write this edition. “Sustainable construction” is a world of trade-offs. You have probably...
20 days ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader, Over the past months you may have noticed something new appearing in sustainability reports, websites and tenders: nature and biodiversity. It’s like in the early 2010s with carbon emissions. Companies started announcing targets that back then no one could differentiate. Carbon neutrality, CO2-neutral, net zero….It was a bit of a wild west. Howdy cowboys! Nature and biodiversity seem to be entering a similar phase. Banks are starting to ask questions. Complex frameworks are coming...
27 days ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader, Yesterday was our little one’s first birthday. Nice party, way too much food, and obviously quite some preparation time in the past few days, including some bad nights of sleep. For a lack of a smoother introduction, I’ll directly get into. Today’s edition of the newsletter is about concrete. Again. Some weeks ago I wrote about the circularity aspects of concrete. Now it is time to tackle the real challenge, reducing the CO₂-footprint. It’s tough to get not too technical but I...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hey Reader, When I read: “Amazon builds first certified zero-carbon building in Europe.” All my alarm bells went off. Zero carbon? Oh really? I don’t doubt their capacity or ambitions. But “zero-carbon building” is one of the most misleading phrases in our industry. Just last Sunday I shared a podcast where Amazon’s climate neutralization lead explained how they approach carbon credits. A few days later, they announced a new delivery station in the UK. Certified Zero Carbon. Of course I had...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader, did you ever get the question whether your building is Paris Proof? What? Paris Proof? What do buildings have to do with Paris? A while ago I got that question from a leading Belgian architect. I knew he was talking about some sustainability framework from the Netherlands. And that it's linked to the Paris Climate Agreement. But I had no clue about the details. As the Netherlands is several years ahead when it comes to sustainable building (and they also tend to oversell what they...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Building Beyond BAU Hey Reader, Concrete is one of the most used materials on earth. It’s everywhere. In our houses, offices, roads, bridges. In Belgium alone, around 12 million cubic meters of ready-mix concrete are produced every year. In the Netherlands, it’s around 14 million cubic meters. In France 40. In Germany 50. Hard to visualize? I get it, for me as well. I’m not a swimmer, so I won’t bother you with these “Olympic swimming pool” comparisons. For Belgium, it means 7 bathtubs full...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Building Beyond BAU Hey Reader, In the late 2010s and early 2020s, it felt like everything suddenly became as-a-service. Software, mobility, then construction products. If we wanted to keep materials in use and avoid waste, business models had to change. Selling something once and losing control forever clearly wasn’t helping. Fast forward a few years. Many of these as-a-service models still exist. But to me it feels like there has never been a real breakthrough. So what does as-a-service...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Building Beyond BAU Hey Reader, Let me start with a fictional scenario that might feel familiar: We recently handed in an offer for a Design & Build tender. The client has high ambitions on circularity so we included the commitment to work with reused materials. Together with the architect, we defined early in the design process that one option was to use reused wooden flooring in a meeting room that is the center piece of the building. So now I’m looking for 80 m² of wooden floor and need to...
2 months ago • 5 min read