Circular Economy Evaluation of Urban Railway Infrastructure

Abstract

The European construction sector is responsible for the consumption of almost 32% of total raw material for realizing its projects (Benachio, Freitas, & Tavares , 2020). On a national level, this amount results to almost 50% for the Dutch construction industry (Nellssen, et al., 2018). The ever-growing population stresses the need for sufficient infrastructure and services which only results in an increase in demand and eventually an increase in resource consumption. The current trend of linear model, wherein the virgin raw materials are used to construct end products and eventually discarded at its end of life, poses a major threat for raw material extinction, and adds to the problem of excessive resource consumption.
A viable solution for this problem is the introduction of circular economy concepts that aim at closing the raw material loops by considering all the current and future life cycle phases of a product in the initial development stages. Since the launch of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) in 2010, circular economy (CE) has gained considerable attention. EMF defines circular economy as “a regenerative system that aims to keep materials in a closed loop at their highest value” (Foundation, Cities in the circular economy: An initial exploration , 2017, page 7). CE focuses on much more than reduction of waste through recycling and aims at reducing the consumption of raw materials, designing products such that they can easily be disassembled and reused and extending product lifespan through maintenance and repair. CE differentiates the gradation options that help keep the materials and components within the loop by options such as refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, etc. One of the important parts of any city is its transport infrastructure that can also make use of the circularity principle. For many developed and developing countries, transport infrastructure accounts for the largest proportion of a country’s budget of any public-works program and consequently also play an important part in a nation’s economic and regional development. Studies show that current developing research of circular economy seldom focuses on the assessment of such transport infrastructure. Therefore, the main focus of this study is to understand the barriers of circular economy and to develop an assessment framework that can help the evaluation of transport infrastructure in terms of circularity.