[Circularity Today] A message from 2050 to the Circular Construction Sector

The mistake now in 2050 looks obvious. We tried to evaluate circularity before building the measurement infrastructure that makes evaluation possible. For years, the sector debated frameworks, certifications, taxonomies, and circularity scores while ignoring a more fundamental question:

How can you measure circularity if you are not continuously observing what happens to materials over time?

We wanted: • assessment without monitoring, • comparison without consistent datasets, • claims without traceability, and that was the real failure.

At the University of Liège Sustainable Building Design Lab, we took a different path. Since 2010, we have been building one of the few longitudinal circular construction databases based on real buildings, not theoretical frameworks: Attia, S. (2026). Database of Demountable Structural Connections for Circular Building Construction: Experimental Dataset and Design Parameters. Version 2. Sustainable Building Design (SBD) Lab, University of Liège, Belgium.

We built it through: • forensic building audits, • on-site inspections, • dismantling observations, • interviews with architects, contractors, manufacturers, and demolition actors, • BIM and AutoCAD extraction, • bill of quantities analysis, • Excel inventories, • material passports and • lifecycle and replacement modeling.

This allowed us to create a cross-project comparative dataset across twelve circular buildings, including projects that have already been dismantled and no longer exist, giving us rare end-of-life evidence that most researchers never capture. We standardized variables so projects could actually be compared:

• material stock, • virgin/reused/recycled content, • embodied carbon, • reversibility of connections, • disassembly time, • service life, • maintenance cycles, • replacement events, • adaptability, • recovery rates, • residual value, • end-of-life destination and • material losses.

We audited thousands of components and more than 2,500 structural connections, which led to our Database of Demountable Structural Connections for Circular Building Construction and Muheeb Al-Obaidy’s BCEF and DeCon frameworks. But the most important contribution is what we use this database for:

Reference-class forecasting for circular construction.

Instead of asking: "How circular is this building today?"

We ask: "What will likely happen to this building in 20, 40, or 80 years based on hundreds of similar components and observed failures?"

This is how we can already predict alarming trends, including the increasingly short life expectancy of individual residential housing systems in Europe. We also combine quantitative evidence with behavioral failures: fragmented ownership, poor documentation, weak maintenance culture, irreversible detailing, and false circular marketing claims. And perhaps most importantly: we document failure openly.

Buildings that were marketed as circular but failed during disassembly teach us as much as successful ones. The future of circular construction will not be built by better slogans. It will be built on longitudinal databases that reveal what truly happens to materials over time.

Working on monitoring circularity in buildings? Share your experience below or reach out. Let's move beyond definitions and indicators.

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