Deep Dive Webinar: Circular Solutions for the Urban Built Environment - Construction & Demolition Waste and the role of Digitalization

The CESD Deep Dive Webinar is part of the Circular Economy Solutions Dialogues (CESD) series, an initiative launched by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in cooperation with the Global Solutions Initiative (GSI). 

Urban areas are at the center of the sustainability agenda. Half of the world population lives in cities today, which makes them vital environments for economic growth. At the same time, it has been reported that cities account for between 60 per cent of resources used and 70 per cent of global carbon emission (UN, 2022). Hence, they have a major role to play in paving the road to sustainable development and implementing the circular economy. Cities can be seen as laboratories where innovative approaches can be tested, and the biodiversity-energy-food-water-climate nexus can be implemented with a circular perspective. 

Urban built environment circular approaches to counter the negative impacts of rapid urbanization are gaining traction, but implementation is slow. The deep dive webinar aims to explore a number of critical questions: 

• What are key factors to achieve circularity in the urban built environment?  

• How can circular procurement effectively integrate bio-based solutions? 

• How can reverse logistics and resource recovery in the construction and demolition waste sector be implemented? 

• To what extent can Nature-Based-Solutions and Circular Solutions embed and make use of Construction & Demolition resources? 

• In what ways could construction waste be prevented or reduced? 

• What are the main challenges to introduce more circularity to the Construction and Demolition Waste sector? What are the differences, in terms of diverse materials or urban settings? 

• How can digital tools improve and enable Construction and Demolition Waste collection? 

The CESD Deep Dive webinar seeks to explore the current state of circularity in the urban built environment and the potential of circular solutions and innovative approaches for implementing circular material flows at the urban level with a focus on Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) and Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) while exploring the concomitant cross-cutting theme of digitalization.  

Key experts from various national and international networks will give their inputs, taking multi-disciplinary angles to the topic. 

Registration and participation is open to the public and is especially relevant for practitioners from the industry. 

For questions, please contact Katharina Lange (katharina.lange@giz.de).