Circular Buildings Coalition (CBC): Scaling Demand-Driven Circular Uptake
The phase is grounded in a clear finding from CBC's Four Pathways analysis: circular approaches could reduce emissions from construction material demand by 28% and cut material use by 25% compared to business as usual by 2050. Making that potential real requires aligning the procurement rules, financial products, insurance frameworks, and quality protocols that shape how the industry makes decisions.
Phase 3 does this through three local market programmes — in the United Kingdom (specifically London), Denmark, and Germany — each focused on a specific circular practice and driven by the demand-side actors who hold the power to change market conditions at scale.
In the project, Smith:
- Serves as Programme Anchor and Grant Holder, with overall responsibility for strategy, coordination, grant management, reporting, and learnings
- Coordinates across all three market programmes, ensuring coherent delivery and shared learning
- Holds CBC's visual identity and external communications, maintaining a consistent voice across all markets.
- Hosts and facilitates thematic agenda-setting seminars that convene leading voices and practitioners
- Tracks and pursues funding opportunities to ensure the coalition's long-term independence from any single funder
- Facilitates relationships between market programmes to enable knowledge transfer and replication across regions (twinning)
In the Local Market programmes, the focus in London will be on standardising the data infrastructure for pre-demolition audits to improve data quality and enable material reuse, while the German demonstrators will work to advance circular public procurement through municipalities. Denmark, which will be led by Smith Innovation and supported by Realdania, will test how take-back schemes can be structured to work at volume market scale, combining the reach of large manufacturers with the agility of specialist SMEs.
Each of the three programmes hosts Blueprint Projects: sub-granted, multistakeholder initiatives that work directly with clients to design and test the procurement, finance, insurance, and assurance mechanisms required for mainstream uptake. Together, the programmes progress circular practices through a structured journey, from confirming the market gap, to trialling solutions, to embedding and replicating them.
At Smith, we believe the transition to a circular built environment is not primarily a technical challenge — it is a market design challenge. Phase 3 is where we put that belief to work.
