Berg van Termunt

Circular construction of multifunctional infrastructure

On the site of the Termunt Mountain, the municipality of Tervuren wants to develop a new multifunctional infrastructure project. The building will house the local football club and youth centre, but it will also be sufficiently polyvalent to accommodate other associations or private initiatives.

In the development of this project, we pay a lot of attention to applying circular principles. Our ambition is to use as few primary raw materials as possible, but rather materials and components that can later be reused or recycled to a high degree.

Circular building is still a very new principle in Flanders and there are hardly any example projects of it. Therefore, we believe that this project can be a real pilot project to stimulate other municipalities and building owners to build in a more sustainable or even circular way.

The project is still in its development phase, with BC Architects and studies giving concrete form to our circular ambitions through the development of an implementation plan.

schema Termunt

schets Termunt

MOST IMPORTANT
RESULTS

  1. The importance of circular construction will only increase. This project can serve as an example for every public organisation that wants to start a building process, both at home and abroad, and by extension even for private building projects.
  2. Our journey is far from over, but we have already reached a number of important milestones, such as the appointment of the architect (BC architects and studies), the approval of the final design and the approval of the environmental permit.
  3. In this project, we want to use a lot of innovative circular building techniques, such as floor insulation from sea shells, wall and roof insulation from straw, stelcon plates instead of screed, recycled concrete plates, a dry assembled structure, etc.
  4. We find it important to focus on dissemination. As a participant in the Green Deal Circular Purchasing and the Green Deal Circular Building, we try to inspire other builders as much as possible through presentations, networking, interviews ...

MOST IMPORTANT
LESSONS LEARNED

  1. We are in the drafting phase of the tender dossier, in which the architect converts our request into an implementation plan. This is proceeding a little slower than usual, because we want to optimise the project, get it closer to the original request and make the circular objectives more concrete.
  2. We have overcome a major economic barrier by no longer selecting products on the basis of the lowest purchase price, but on the basis of total cost of ownership.
  3. We started looking much wider and deeper for potential contractors who could answer our circular question. This resulted in three candidates, which was a win-win situation: we only received high-quality tenders and the bidders had a real chance of winning.
  4. We deliberately chose not to use rigid terms of reference with a detailed step-by-step plan, but a more open approach. This way, the implementation is done more in partnership, where client and contractor are on an equal footing. We will use this form of tendering more often in the future.

WHAT DOES
THE FUTURE HOLD?

We have already learned some interesting lessons, had to abandon some paths, while other opportunities have taken their place. Since the project has not yet been implemented, we cannot yet evaluate any concrete achievements. The final result strongly depends on the choices we will make in the coming weeks and months in many different areas.

We know for sure that in future tenders we will take more account of the aspects of sustainability and circularity. We also try to spread such thinking in the internal organisation.