Project R-11544

Encouraging (future) house owners to use regenerative building materials (Research)

The construction industry has a large impact on several environmental issues, from resource depletion and carbon emissions to waste generation. Current energy performance regulations aim to reduce the operational energy use of buildings, but cause a (partial) shift of the environmental burden towards other lifecycle stages. Meanwhile the construction industry continues to use mostly inorganic, high impact materials, such as concrete and fired brick, with a high amount of embodied energy and consuming large amounts of natural resources. An alternative could be to use mainly low-impact, regenerative building materials, i.e. materials that can be regrown faster than they are depleted. As in Belgium (in 2018), nearly three-quarters of dwellings are owner occupied and dwellings account for over 80% of building permits, the power to facilitate this shift is for a large part in hands of private house owners. Therefore, the aim of this PhD is to investigate how house owners can be encouraged to build or renovate with lower impact, regenerative building materials. Through interviews with both house owners who did use regenerative materials as well as with house owners who did not yet use any regenerative materials, the arguments for their choices and the processes that led to these choices will be investigated. Later a methodology to encourage the use of regenerative materials will be developed and tested.

01 February 2020 - 31 December 2022