Rijkswaterstaat's vision on construction in CEAP : non-paper : towards a climate neutral and circular European infrastructure

Many of the EU's new CE actions for the built environment focus on buildings, although infrastructure is equally essential for achieving a climate neutral, circular European economy. Infrastructure has a high environmental impact from material use, waste production and CO2 emissions. The sector therefore offers enormous opportunities to tackle climate change, for high-quality reuse and recycling, circular design and the use of renewable materials. It also contributes in many ways to making buildings circular. Infrastructure and buildings are highly interdependent in terms of material flows, supply chains, standards and norms, and share many similarities like digital logbooks, circular design, measurement methods, and etc. At the same time, infrastructure faces a number of specific challenges that involve different stakeholders and requires special consideration. Because circularity in buildings and infrastructure is strongly interlinked, we aim to stress the potential of an integrated approach to circular construction. Rijkswaterstaat calls on the European Commission to integrate the infrastructure sector in the circular construction actions and proposes a number of elements.