DXB pledges to ban single-use plastics

We all know it’s time to do things differently. It’s time to come up with a new way to manage our money. One that is inclusive and sustainable. One that takes into account our financial health, the planet’s health, and the health of our society.

The workshop will incorporate carbon footprint evaluation and circular economy into a structural design workflow with a focus on timber structures. Through the combined use of parametric tools for structural design such as Karamba3D, and optimization tools such as Octopus, comparative strategies will be used to mediate between purely structural and environmental criteria, suggesting a more holistic design process. In the context of the climate emergency, architects and engineers try to reduce the environmental impact of structures through a shift in their design process. The use of recycled material plays a major role in this approach. One of the central questions is how can we design sustainable and smart structures by intelligently using recycled elements. Many factors such as the history of the elements, their condition, or their location influence the design, the carbon footprint, and the price. Parametric structural design tools, coupled with multi-dimensional optimization methods, can help to explore the design space and evaluate designs concerning those criteria.

The role of a forest sector in the transition to a circular economy (CE) is critical. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to summarize the main findings of the most important published articles and to provide insights on the interdisciplinary space at the interface of concepts related to a forest-based CE. Moreover, it attempts to assess the challenges raised from adopting the CE in forest sector. Through a systematic literature review, 69 scientific publications were selected and evaluated by two sights: (i) a descriptive analysis and (ii) a cluster analysis of the keywords related to the forest-based CE. The study highlights the need for additional survey on optimizing the interaction between forest ecosystem services and circular economy. Further discussion is also needed about the relations of the key factors associated with the forest-based circular economy, as they emerged from the cluster analysis and the co-occurrence network map.