ANALYSIS OF THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY

Abstract

The origin of the concept of the circular economy is from around 1960s (Kenneth 1966). However, the abundant of researches on the circular economy in various aspects such as chemical industry (Li and Su 2012, Ma et al. 2014), iron and steel industry (Ma et al. 2013) appeared only in recent two decades.

With the accelerating urbanization in China, the development of circular economy in construction industry gradually attracted the attention of the government. In September 2016, the general office of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China issued the Guiding Opinions on Vigorously Promoting Prefabricated buildings. Since then, prefabricated buildings have officially risen to the level of a national strategy (Luo 2018). However, the progress of development of prefabricated steel construction is still slow with the support of the policy. One of the resistances is the increase in the cost by using prefabricated steel construction(YouCai 2018). This paper carried out a further study on the comparison of using conventional cast-in-situ construction method and prefabricated steel construction method from the short-term view based on J57 Mini Sky City and the long-term view based on multiple projects over 30 years, the result showed that the profit of using the prefabricated steel construction method is 18% less than the profit of using the conventional cast-in-situ construction method in the short-term view and on the contrary, the profit of using the prefabricated steel construction method is 97.2% more than using the conventional cast-in-situ construction method in the long-term view.

According to the research result, this paper also provided a few recommendations for better incorporating the concept of circular economy in the construction industry.