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Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD)
- Felix Heisel
- Susan Holland
- Gretchen Marlene Worth
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The concept of circular economy seeks to disrupt the enormous amount of waste generated by a linear system. The system extracts raw materials from the earth to construct the built environment, including its buildings and infrastructure, only for those materials to be dumped into landfills after a relatively short lifespan (Fusco Girard & Nocca, 2019). In a circular system, natural resources and embodied carbon are conserved through prolonging the lifespan of existing building stock through preservation, retrofitting, and repair (Huuhka & Vestergaard, 2019; McCarthy & Glekas, 2019); deconstructing buildings and salvaging usable fixtures and building materials; and transforming new construction through designing with repurposed building materials and for deconstruction (Heisel and Hebel, 2021).
There have been growing calls for whole countries, regions and communities to achieve circularity, particularly within Europe and Asia (Kovacic et al., 2019). Within North America, there have been efforts to re-envision local government and private sector systems of demolition with deconstruction, particularly within Vancouver, BC, Canada; in the Bay Area Deconstruction Working Group in California; Portland, Oregon; and New York, NY. However, research into how concepts of circular economy fit within the highly variable and uneven regulatory context of urban planning and historic preservation in North America remain limited. Likewise, there has been limited planning scholarship into how deconstruction efforts might fit into the creation of green jobs and sustainable transformation of construction activity.
The Circularity Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD) Taskforce developed out of an alliance of community leaders and academics concerned with a vast system of building material waste within New York State. CR0WD seeks to advance sustainability, resilience, and green jobs within the built environment. CR0WD's efforts are aimed at helping communities realize the environmental, cultural and economic benefits of prolonging the lifespan of buildings and reusing building materials and architectural elements through research, education, policy initiatives and design that emphasizes deconstruction, salvage, and preservation.
The group is sustained through shared leadership between organizations such as: Historic Ithaca; the Susan Christopherson Center for Community Planning; the Preservation Association of Central New York; Finger Lakes ReUse; the City of Ithaca; as well as other nonprofit and governmental partners; and the research labs the Circular Construction Lab and Just Places Lab at Cornell University.