Erratum to: 36th International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1186/s13054-016-1208-6.]

How do current policies support a transition towards a circular economy in the built environment?

Building and construction industry consumes huge quantities of materials in an unsustainable way. As a result of a linear design approach and economic model, at the end of use, but also throughout the cycle, buildings or parts of buildings are demolished and remnants treated as waste or –best case– down-cycled. This creation of waste as well as the use of virgin resources leads to an important environmental, economic and societal impact. To create a sustainable build environment, the building sector needs to move towards a circular economy in which circular and dynamic buildings as well as their component and materials preserve value. Policies and regulations in member states and across the EU will influence the ability to transition to a circular economy – positively and negatively. Within the H2020 Buildings As Materials Banks (BAMB) Project work is underway to understand where the opportunities and barriers lie in a complex and, sometimes contradictory, regulatory landscape. This paper presents an overview of the current policy instruments that are considered to have relevance in relation to promoting, or possibly hindering, the adoption of circular economy opportunities in the built environment. The analysis of the current policy instruments has been done on a European level and on a member state level for 4 different countries being: Belgium, Portugal, Sweden and UK. The paper will mainly focus on the European Level and Belgium

An integrated approach for financial and environmental cost optimisation of heating services

A four-year project has started in 2007 to develop a methodology that can be applied to optimize the Belgian dwelling stock. The aim of the project is to optimise buildings concerning their environmental impact, their financial cost and the quality they offer over the whole life cycle, from the production of primary raw materials to the final demolition and end-of-life treatment. In the first phase of the project the optimisation methodology is developed; i.e. environmental impacts are analysed by means of life cycle assessment (LCA); financial costs are calculated based on life cycle cost analyses (LCC); and the quality evaluation is based on multi-criteria analyses (MCA). The aim of the optimization is to realize the highest marginal quality improvement for the additional financial and environmental cost. In a second phase the developed methodology is translated into a work instrument and applied to different dwelling types. This paper goes more deeply into the role heating services play in the environmental and financial costs. For a typical Belgian dwelling initial and life cycle costs for commonly used as well as advanced heating configurations are compared. Since energy consumption for heating is dependent of the way the building envelope is built, the analysis is performed on two dwelling configurations with a different insulation level