The substantial environmental impact of buildings has garnered significant attention. However, sustainability efforts often prioritise structural and envelope materials, overlooking building services - systems for ensuring occupants’ safety and comfort. Given their complexity, rapid technological advancements, and substantial costs, these components necessitate a circular economy approach to optimise resource utilisation. This study conducts a systematic literature review to assess the current state of circular economy implementation in building services, identifying barriers, opportunities, key influencers, and potential strategies. Findings indicate that applying circular economy principles within building services remains nascent. Barriers encompass technical, economic, legislative, and organisational challenges. Conversely, numerous opportunities exist, alongside six key influential stakeholders. The analysis enabled the development of a framework to integrate existing principles and building blocks with identified essential strategies for advancing circular building services. The integrated strategies include design, business models, policy, product information, warranties, life cycle costing, digital technology, education, collaboration, and transparency. This study recognises various research gaps and highlights the need for further exploration to realise the full potential of circular economy in building services. Ultimately, a shift in mindset, coupled with new skills and holistic approaches, is required to drive progress in this domain. Practical application: The application of circular economy in building services is still nascent, representing a missing piece for advancing sustainable construction. This paper examines the existing knowledge in this domain to identify barriers, opportunities, and key influencers. The strategies identified enabled a framework for advancing circular building services. The study is vital for engineers, designers, researchers, policy makers, and all other stakeholders to advance circularity in the building services sector.

The circular economy is considered the best principle through which sustainable practices may be established. Mineral exhaustion, decarbonisation, and waste elimination can all be addressed through a circular economy. The built environment is one of the largest waste producers and a significant user of materials such as concrete and steel. However, there are considerable barriers to the adoption of a circular economy. The objective of the study was to identify, examine, and comprehend the main challenges that impede the implementation and scaling of circular practices within the built environment. As part of the CircularB network, a questionnaire was launched in 2024 to gather opinions on the technical, political, regulatory, cultural, societal, economic, and market barriers to circular economy from built environment professionals. This paper focuses on the economic and market barriers, which were recognised as the most important according to the insights of 270 respondents. The hurdles investigated include extra costs of building insurance, inadequate collaboration, linear public procurement, unwillingness to take back used components, low awareness of exchange marketplaces, and market disconnection due to significant transport distances. Addressing these barriers plays a crucial role in advancing a circular built environment, and all stakeholders must explore solutions to overcome them.

The Capability and Support of Structure Capital on BIM Innovation in SME

Research and technological developments have mainly focused on increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, improving the thermal properties of the envelope and reducing energy consumption. Another critical issue is related to waste reduction and implementation of circular economy frameworks. Moreover, building services have a significant impact upon the health of users and any application of the circular economy has to consider the effect on the occupants’ well-being. In this chapter, two aspects are considered: the first relates to the building systems which utilise energy for heating, cooling, ventilation, electrical supply; the second concerns the systems converting the energy from the sun, wind, and soil. Regarding the usage of energy in buildings, the types of materials applied in building services are categorised including metals, plastics, electronic components, etc. The barriers to the adoption of circular supply chain management are illustrated collecting information from the literature, especially in the air conditioning sector. Then, the electricity and thermal energy production from renewable sources are presented in the light of implementing a circular economy at the building and urban scale. Solar, both PV and thermal, wind, and geothermal technologies are illustrated in terms of trends in installation and prediction of waste production. Best practices of recycling are illustrated from projects, industrial processes, and companies. The collected information highlights the need for closer collaboration between the involved stakeholders, starting from the citizens and extending to all members of the design, construction, and building management professions.