China’s Cofco raises $2.1b in country’s first sustainability loan

Here’s how a highly intensive manufacturer of insulation and related building products with a presence in 33 countries in Europe, North America and Asia has been on a journey towards the circular economy for over 20 years, and knows it still has far to go. Owens Corning’s website defines sustainability as being about meeting the needs of the present while leaving the world a better place for the future. It claims that sustainability is at “the heart of our business, from the products we make to the way we make them”. It declares that it “considers the future in the decisions we make today…working to expand our handprint while we reduce our footprint”. Its 2030 goals are “to be a net-positive company, one where the positive impacts of our people and products (our handprint) exceeds the negative impacts of our operations (our footprint)”.

In a previous blog post, I discussed the Design Lifecyle as having three primary stages: Pre-Building, Building and Post-Building. I spent considerable time in the Pre-Building phase focused on the sourcing and manufacture of sustainable construction materials. In this installment, we’ll segue into the Building stage and plumb the depths of sustainable construction techniques.
In his 2011 book “Waste,” Mohamed Osmani estimated that construction waste produced on a typical job site is as much as 30% of the total weight of the building materials delivered to the site. So for every 100 pounds of construction material brought to the site, 30 of it will be wasted. That means that by 2025, the amount of construction waste generated each year will be over 2.2 billion tons.