PSI - Issue 64

Patrizia Ghisellini et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 64 (2024) 1689–1695 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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1. Introduction The circular economy (CE) transition offers to the construction industry great opportunities to reduce its environmental impacts (Le et al., 2023) and at the same time to favor its further socio-economic development (Harala et al., 2023). Construction industry consumes a large amount of raw materials and contributes to the release of about 40% of global carbon emissions (Benachio et al., 2020). Not to mention that construction and demolition wastes (C&DWs) are a relevant share of total solid waste produced worldwide accounting about 30% of the total (Gasparri et al., 2023). The role of circular start-ups (CSUs) is particularly meaningful in CE transition since they are innovative in all the dimensions of sustainability (Sucheck et al., 2022) and for this reason their circular business models play a pivotal role for all the actors of the industrial ecosystem (Henry et al., 2022). This is important for the construction industry that is characterised by some resistance to adopt eco-innovations (Saari et al., 2024). The Italian CSUs investigated by our research group are introducing building materials aimed to reuse local agricultural by-products (such as rice and wheat straw) reducing the extraction of virgin materials, land use and generating positive outcomes in particular to the local communities where they are located (Ghisellini et al., 2023). This study shows the results of a research supported by two funded projects, namely: Just Transition to Circular Economy (JUST2CE) project † within the EU Horizon 2020 initiatives and the INSPIRE project within the PRIN initiative. This study presents the preliminary results of a research work that is still in progress which overall goal is to improve the understanding of the CSUs operating in the bio-construction industry in Italy and the environmental impacts and performances of their building products. Moreover, the research aims to explore how circular innovation is organized in the construction industry ecosystems of the selected CSU (Havinga et al., 2023) and the relationships with the leading large companies of their ecosystems The structure of this study develops with the Introduction followed by four subsections. Section 2 summarizes the data used in the research and the method for collecting the data. Section 3 presents the main results and section 4 concludes commenting the main results in relation to the goals and discusses briefly the implications for the research and practice.

Nomenclature C&DW Construction and Demolition Waste CSUs Circular Start-ups LCA Life Cycle Assessment CED Cumulative Energy Demand

2. Material and Methods The main steps of the research are described in chronological order as:

1. Initial mapping and interviews to the founders of the identified Italian circular start-ups working in the bio-construction industry. Different sources were used to identify the CSUs such as the Atlas of the Circular Economy (2024) and web articles useful to extract data about CSUs in construction industry. At the end of this first mapping the following CSU were found: Ricehouse, Prespaglia, Tecnocanapa, Edizero, Forever Bamboo, The Colours of Mediterranean. So far, the founders of two CSUs have been interviewed by means of direct meetings. 2. Literature review of two fields of research. The first one deals with life cycle assessment (LCA) studies aiming to evaluate the impacts and performances of bio-construction materials, products and

† JUST2CE (Just Transition to the Circular Economy): https://just2ce.eu/