With a continuing real estate crisis and great goals to finally deal with the problem, the Irish construction sector will be changed significantly in the coming years.
In addition, there will be a shift to deliver green buildings that are not provided as Nice-to-have-have, but they will be necessary in the context of increasingly demanding EU guidelines.
“We have to pass from recycling and recovery to prevention and reuse,” says Pat Barry, Managing Director of Irish Green Building Council (IGBC). At the start of the construction of a circular Ireland, he spoke the Roadmap of the Council for a resource -efficient, circular environment.
The ambitious document contains several strange framework conditions and initiatives, in which Ireland's linear economic model for “take-make waste” in a more circular, in which materials are reused and buildings are designed for adaptability.
More than 29 percent of the global loss of biological diversity are due to the extraction and processing of natural resources for construction.
And in Ireland, construction and the built environment are responsible for 37 percent of our national emissions – 23 percent of them that are generated during the operational phase (i.e. heating, cooling, lighting of buildings) – and 14 percent of which are embodied carbon that include emissions from building materials and during the construction process (extraction, production, transport, transport, transport, transport, installation and demolition).
It is this embodied carbon – and the 8.3 million tons of construction and waste waste that are produced annually must be reduced to rely on our construction industry on a more sustainable foundation.
“It is about reuse of buildings and the more intensive use of our schools, houses and offices. It is about designing for adaptability and disassembly and optimization of material consumption,” says Barry.
The roadmap also requires better planning and a mixture of house types and sizes, since compact developments reduce the carbon intensity of buildings and infrastructure.
For example, Greenfield locations, which have not yet been built, require 32 percent more embodied carbon than wastelands – ie previously developed locations.
Combating vacancy, decay and demolition of existing buildings is another priority, since the often cited Maxima “The most sustainable building is that already exists”.
The IGBC also points out that many of the three- and four-bedroom houses are not occupied within the existing housing stock. 67 percent of people in Ireland and 88 percent of the over 65 people living in under-occupied houses. This is twice as high as the European average and the third highest in Europe.
According to the IGBC, a solution to combat larger houses would be to integrate one and two bedroom houses into districts in order to enable downsizing so that larger houses can be released for those they need.
“The transition to compact forms of development such as apartments and terrace houses would enable more houses to be built up for fewer costs in workers, materials, operating energy and carbon emissions,” the report says.
Some recent urban developments already include these denser mixed accommodation styles, but many more are probably needed – ideally in renovated existing buildings.
The background to all of this is the revised European energy performance of the building directive, in which the Member States have to count in all new buildings by 2030. Member States must publish a roadmap with goals to reduce emissions from buildings by 2027.
However, there are several stumbling blocks on the way before many of the visionary goals can be achieved in the new IGBC document. The first of them is the current Irish building corrections that prevent the use of flammable timber in floors of buildings above 10 m (three floors).
The use of wood in larger buildings is a valuable way to reduce embodied carbon. The working group of timber construction under construction was formed in 2023 to tackle some of the cultural and regulatory problems, which prevents wood in medium to high -rise buildings in Ireland.
Current fire protection regulations are a barrier, inadequate training when using wood under construction is different. In many other European countries, the mass -powered wood is considered building material, and buildings framed from wood are up to 80 m (24 floors).
Another problem is that the reuse of materials from buildings that are to be demolished in Ireland is not yet the norm.
More than 97 percent of the materials flow through the Irish economy come from virgin sources.
The latest new categorization of soil and stone as a by -product instead of waste by the environmental protection authority is a step in the right direction. However, such by -products can only be used for roads and landscapes and not for construction. And there are many other potentially useful demolition materials that go to landfills or combustion.
John Casey, civil engineer and founder/managing director of Cora Consulting Engineers, is one of the few operators of the construction industry who want to actively try to reuse materials.
“The reuse of steel in the Google Treasury building in the Lower Grand Canal Street was the first time that Stahl was reused in Ireland,” explains Casey. And while the company received a new certification (CE brand) for the reused steel, he said that it was not necessary because the steel was reused in the same building from which it came.
Casey was also reused in the newly designed Google building that saved money for the customer. “The fact that the customer owned the building and was the only inmate made it easier. Developers who rent or sell a building are more careful, as recalculated materials are perceived,” he adds.
The lack of companies in Ireland, the materials that were taken from buildings to reuse in other buildings, do not help. The use of so -called secondary materials has become so popular in London that reuse of increased access floor tiles are more expensive than new, according to experts who observe activities for circular elsewhere.
The recertification of secondary/reusable building materials is one of the essential steps to develop a marketplace for such materials. And while the IGBC developed a digital platform (Pilot Construction Materials Exchange), this no longer works.
“There was great interest in the red granite, which we set up CMEX, but in the long run there must be more foresight so that materials such as steel rays, concrete blocks and ferastel concrete floors and wood can be removed from the building and handed over directly to the customer,” says Casey.
By adding circular economic statements and pre -control tests (now mandatory in London), early material mapping would enable the products to be kept in circulation of the highest value.
Christian van Maaren operates a successful excess material exchange in the Netherlands using product passes using QR codes and radio frequency identifying tags to grant potential buyers immediate access to material composition, condition, location, quantity and life cycle of products.
In Ireland, “Loop Your Spare” is a new digital platform for reuse of excess materials between construction projects. Companies like IGBC and others will hope that such a platform can be a model for the construction industry in order to use more sustainable practices.