Local stakeholder meeting in County Bergstrasse (June 2024)
County Bergstrasse´s 4th stakeholder meeting took place on June, 4th 2024. This event allowed regional experts, to exchange on the importance of circularity in the construction sector through the presentation of different local initiatives.
The County Bergstrasse is actively promoting a sustainable circular economy in the construction sector. As part of the INTERREG Europe project KARMA, a regional meeting was recently held where experts from science, business and the public sector discussed innovative approaches to circular construction.
The importance of this topic for climate and resource protection is considerable: the construction sector is responsible for around 54 percent of Germany's annual waste generation and 40 percent of global CO2 emissions. Building materials should therefore be used for as long and as intensively as possible and kept in circulation. This requires strategic rethinking of their reuse, recycling or recovery from the very beginning. At the same time, the use of secondary building materials holds great potential for the construction industry. The KARMA project, which involves seven partners from five European countries, aims to promote circular approaches in the areas of waste, recycling and construction at municipal level.
At the most recent meeting with the regional network partners in Heppenheim, specific projects were presented, including the planning status of the new STEM education center in Bensheim. The County is planning to implement numerous aspects of sustainable and circular construction in this pilot project. Mara Schubert presented her master's thesis (Civil Engineering, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences) on sustainable procurement in school construction with newly developed criteria for the sustainable tendering and procurement of public construction services. Jörg Kordes introduced current plans and ideas for pilot projects in the Metropolitan Region Rhine-Neckar.
County Administrator Christian Engelhardt emphasized the importance of involving regional players: “We want to use the perspective and knowledge of experts from the construction industry, the skilled trades and the demolition and recycling industry to develop regional solutions for circular construction. With this initiative, we want to provide important impetus for sustainable construction practices and the development of a resource-conserving and climate-friendly construction industry. We also want to promote the exchange of knowledge at regional and international level.”
In December, County Bergstrasse will host a delegation of all project partners to exchange expertise and experience. The project partner is therefore busy planning workshops and visits to pilot projects in the region
Authors: Benjamin and Katharina (County Bergstrasse)