regenerate is a circular economy engagement tool for all those involved in the design and construction of buildings. It can be applied to all building types, retrofits and new builds. It explores, just how circular is your building?

The circular economy aims to maintain resources at their highest value, eliminating waste, and creating a positive impact on the wider environment. It is this ethos that regenerate aims to promote and encourage within building design.

regenerate consists of a series of Circularity Criteria (CCs), which are split into four categories: design for adaptability; design for deconstruction; circular materials; and resource efficiency. These criteria are then applied to the core building layers: site, structure, skin, services and space. These criteria act both as prompts for design teams to consider if that CC could be applied beneficially to their building, and as a simplified measure of which CCs have been achieved within a building.

regenerate is best used to embed circularity at the inception of design, although it can also be used at later stages, and reapplied as a design evolves to explore how building circularity has changed as the design has progressed, and the project is completed.

Regenerate was developed by Danielle Densley Tingley, Will Mihkelson, Charles Gillott (all University of Sheffield) and David Cheshire (AECOM); and funded by the University of Sheffield’s EPSRC Impact Accelerator Account.