How can you embed circularity into decisions about whether to demolish or refurbish social housing?
 
Typically, little information is available to help social housing providers and their advisors make considered judgements of the impact of demolition v refurbishment in carbon and other terms.
 
A Pre-Demolition or Pre-Refurbishment Audit can help, but the process is often time-consuming and labour intensive. Also, audits are often done too late in the project, meaning decisions are often taken too late to have maximum impact.
 
Supported by Innovate UK under the NICER programme, the PreaDeM project (Pre-demolition environmental assessment and Decision-Making) aims to help the sector realise better circularity outcomes when considering whether to demolish or refurbish homes.
 
A key objective is to develop a smarter way to quantify what is there, for example, using more state of the art technology combined with detailed specification information and assumptions to determine what can be extracted for reuse and recycling and help with embodied carbon assessments.
 
The project, led by circular economy consultancy Reusefully alongside partners Sustenic, Cambridge Sustainable Design and Salvo, will host an online webinar on Friday 26 May, from 9.30 - 11.00 BST to present the findings from the study.
 
The free-to-attend event will explore how UK social housing typologies and publicly available data can be used to feed into a decision-making tool that is being developed by the project team, and show how new technology and thinking can improve the efficiency, accuracy and value of audits and assessments.
 
Programme for the event:
- Introduction to PreaDeM and Circularity for Social Housing - Katherine Adams, Reusefully
- Developing the Methodology and PreaDeM in Action - Ben Cartwright, Reusefully and Toby Balson, Cambridge Sustainable Design
- Using Public Data and Housing Typologies in the PreaDeM Toolkit - Rob Flynn, Sustenic
- Q&A and Panel Discussion