Circular Economy Aspects of Construction in Municipalities project (“RANTA”) enhanced municipalities’ ability and know-how to implement methodologies and ways to operate supporting circular economy aspects in building demolition and controlling land masses in construction. The project focused on demonstration of enhanced utilization of the building materials and land masses based on case studies in buildings and construction areas owned by the municipalities. In addition, the project focused on increasing understanding of the process and in example developing a circular economy -based criteria for public procurement of building demolition.
RANTA project focused in hands-on-development of the demolition processes together with selected municipalities and their collaborators such as private companies. It is important that re-use of parts of buildings and materials from demolished buildings can be increased in the spirit of circular economy. This can reduce the amount of waste from construction sector, which is presently in Finland the second largest compared to other sectors. In particular, the cities and municipalities own a substantial amount of buildings and therefore the impact of a change into more circular economy approach may be expected to be high.
RANTA project pointed out new ways to operate and new business opportunities related to circular economy. Also the obstacles and enablers of new ways to operate were pointed out. Practical case-studies were done in Helsinki and Hämeenlinna.
The project was implemented during November 2016 and January 2019 in Finland. It was coordinated by Green Net Finland (based in Helsinki) and co-partnered by HAMK Häme University of Applied Sciences (Hämeenlinna), Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (Helsinki) and SYKLI Environmental School of Finland (Riihimäki). The project was funded by the European Union Regional Development Fund and the cities of Helsinki, Hämeenlinna and Vantaa.
RANTA project’s main outcomes were the timely “overall picture” of the status and key bottlenecks for increasing the recycling and re-use of materials and items from to-be-demolished buildings. Recommendations for the municipalities and best practices were published in a final report (only in Finnish language). The main results were also published at major national events and used as a partial input to developing the Finnish National procurement criteria for municipalities for demolishing constructions (to be published in late 2019 by the Environmental Ministry of Finland).
In July 2019 RANTA project was awarded a REGIOSTARS 2019 finalist award by the European Commission. The REGIOSTARS contest awards exceptionally innovative and influential projects from the European Union that have been funded by the Regional Development fund.
The important work started in RANTA is continued by the same consortium in a new project HYPPY (starting September 2019). HYPPY project aims to get deeper into the potential business models and procedures of re-using parts of buildings and materials within the demolishing work of the municipalities.
