Background
The extensive construction activity in cities and urban areas involves excavation and blasting to prepare sites for new buildings or infrastructure. The excavated masses need to be managed. It is challenging to utilise the large volumes of various types of masses locally or in other projects. They require areas for temporary storage pending need, areas for cleaning and sorting to create usable fractions and qualities, and areas for permanent disposal. Transporting large volumes of masses poses challenges in terms of road capacity, risk, and emissions.
Masses not sent for reuse or recycling are considered waste. The simplest solution today is often to transport these masses to landfills. Estimates suggest that 80 percent of the masses end up in landfills.
Soil, foundations, and outdoor areas in construction projects require the supply of masses of varying qualities. Extracting and transporting these also entail land use and impact on road capacity, risk, and emissions. High economic activity in the Oslo region and other urban regions, combined with a lack of reuse and recycling of masses, results in significant negative consequences related to resource and energy consumption, and consumption of nature in a broad sense.
About the Project
Research questions:
- How do the construction and infrastructure activities in cities and urban areas impose environmental burdens on the surrounding areas in terms of mass extraction, handling, disposal, and associated transport?
- How can energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, and land use resulting from urban development and densification be better included in the impact assessments and analyses of development projects? Here, we will study the work of both authorities and private actors.
- Material and energy flows today are more or less linear. How can they be changed to become more circular? Here, we will focus particularly on the significance of laws and regulations.
The project work includes documentation of:
- mass flows in and out for a selection of construction projects, including classification of the masses into new original masses, masses for reuse, and masses for recycling
- environmental burdens and their causes. This will be linked to the various stages in the chain/mass flows, and we will examine the potential for reductions.
- practices. We will look into practices in municipalities in processing development applications and zoning plans, and in the establishment of mass landfills, in addition to practices in construction projects in the public and private sectors. What rule changes and incentives can bring about changes/improvements in practices?
To account for the formal processes, the project will review legislation, contracts, jurisprudence, and other documents. Practices will be mapped and described through interviews and document analyses. The project will engage with developers, contractors, public authorities, politicians, and some of the major recipients.
In the autumn of 2023, a study trip to the Netherlands, a country with significantly less use of landfills and more reuse and recycling than Norway, will be conducted.
The project leader is Professor Bjørnar Sæther at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.
Publications
Results and recommendations 06/2021: Preliminary project: Mass Management and Mass Landfills in Oslo and Viken. (in Norwegian)
Duration
February 2023 – December 2024