Last week, the national government and the market presented a Building Materials Agreement to contribute to a circular construction sector. Opinion writer Jan Willem van de Groep thinks his own way. "It is a catalog of obstacles, with no breakthrough strategy."
With the Building Materials Agreement, the construction industry is presenting a common story of sustainability. Thirteen material chains have drawn up a roadmap and the government emphasizes that this is an important step towards a future-proof construction sector. Reading the documents, however, one sees above all how wide the gap still is between ambition and reality. The agreement accurately portrays the bottlenecks but hardly offers the guidance needed to solve them.
Most material chains are still in a preparation phase. The roadmaps show that concrete and steel are the only ones actually in the scale-up phase. The rest are still working on studies, baseline measurements, inventories and explorations. As a result, the 2030 targets have already become unachievable. The time remaining is too short to achieve substantial reductions through voluntary process agreements.
Silence before the storm
In addition, the agreement is conspicuously silent on the biggest structural task: drastically reducing primary raw materials. The roadmaps focus largely on recycling and optimization, not substitution or absolute reduction of material use. The news release accompanying the agreement does talk about increasing the availability of raw materials and reducing environmental damage costs, but these ambitions are hardly reflected in the roadmaps.
The chains themselves signal where things are going wrong. Standards hamper innovation, use of secondary materials stagnates due to regulations, business cases are weak and clients do not steer sustainability sufficiently. This is not an external analysis; it is in almost every roadmap. Yet the agreement lacks a real approach to removing these known lock-ins. The result is a catalog of obstacles without a breakthrough strategy.
On top of that, the agreement does not clearly categorize materials. The climate and material impacts of steel, concrete, ceramics, plastics or bio-based fibers are substantially different, but each material moves within its own logic and future path. This leaves out of the picture what shifts in material use are necessary for a construction sector that stays within the climate budget and can continue to build future-proof.
Reduction potential remains out of the picture
The biobased chains hardly play a role in all this. The wood sector mentions the value of renewable resources and CO2 storage, but fast-growing crops and new fiber chains are missing. This leaves much of the possible reduction potential out of the picture. The current industrial infrastructure forms the basis of the agreement and that makes it difficult to really make new choices.
So the Building Materials Agreement mainly shows where things are still lacking. It provides insight into opportunities and obstacles but lacks a compelling framework, an integral prioritization and a concrete set of instruments to take action. Anyone who really wants to make the construction sector more sustainable needs more than roadmaps.
A clear steering model is needed in which clients become leading, in which standards enable innovation and in which the sector is rewarded for future-proof choices. Only if the government dares to take on this role will the agreement become more than an inventory. Then it can develop into an instrument with which the construction industry can actually accelerate and make the necessary transition to a circular and climate-positive sector. Until then, it mainly shows how big the task still is.
This article was written by Jan Willem van de Groep, programmer, future thinker and publicist. He is known, among other things, for the government program Building Balance.
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