Circular Economy

Circular economy studies how material and product are kept in cycles rather than discarded after use: reuse, refurbishment, material passports and design for disassembly. It focuses on the value-retention hierarchy — retain before reuse before recycle before incinerate — and on the institutional barriers that keep linear procurement in place.

FM manages the life cycle of furniture, installations and building components, and is therefore the party that must operationalise circularity in practice: what happens to a removed floor, a written-off desk, a replaced unit. Without FM involvement, circularity stays a procurement clause without execution.

• Does a material passport exist for this component, and is it accessible at the point of disassembly?
• Is 'circular' here a design choice, a procurement requirement, or only a supplier claim?
• What does keeping an object functioning longer actually cost, versus replacing it with a newer, more efficient alternative?

• Ellen MacArthur Foundation — frameworks and research on circular business models.
• EU Circular Economy Action Plan and related product regulation (Ecodesign, Construction Products Regulation).

• Circular procurement requires different contract forms (leasing, product-as-a-service) than ownership-based procurement.
• Circularity and life-cycle cost can conflict: keeping an inefficient object in use longer may harm the carbon target while serving the circularity target.

• Procurement and sourcing of furniture and installations
• Waste management (material flows at end of use)

• Material passport and life-cycle registration

• Demand organisation

  Circularity targets should be set at the client-role level before the procurement specification is written.

• EU Circular Economy Action Plan; ISO 59000 series (circular economy, under development — verify status).

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• Recycling rate presented as circularity, when recycling is the lowest rung of the value-retention hierarchy.

Material passports exist for new construction but hardly for the existing stock; the vast majority of the building base has no usable material data for future disassembly.

• Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Towards the Circular Economy.