Zero Emissions Innovation Centre / Carbon Leadership Forum BC

To mitigate climate change, understanding the interrelationship between decarbonization and the circular economy is essential. Applying circular principles to urban settings, and especially to buildings, plays a significant role in reducing carbon emissions.

Zero Emissions Innovation Centre (ZEIC) is a hub designed to scale urban and climate solutions across British Columbia. With many programs under its wing, ZEIC is able to take action in a number of areas. One of these programs is Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF) BC, which promotes best practices, including circular economy practices of repurpose and reuse, to reduce embodied carbon in buildings.

We spoke with Stephanie Dalo, Program Manager at Carbon Leadership Forum BC, about how ZEIC and its program CLF BC have been catalyzing, accelerating, and scaling climate innovation in the built environment.

What inspired ZEIC’s leadership to engage in circularity?

Operating against a backdrop of global uncertainty, pressing affordability challenges, economic insecurity, and worsening climate impacts, Zero Emissions Innovation Centre was created to serve as a leading hub for urban decarbonization to accelerate and scale climate innovation in BC.

Our mission is to draw down emissions across a range of sectors in urban regions while enabling affordability, health, and resilience. We do this by connecting and activating industry action-takers, demonstrating and showcasing viable solutions, and investing in capacity building and readiness to scale impact to achieve better, more efficient buildings that enable healthy, comfortable, and accessible places to live, work, and play. Circular economy principles are intrinsically connected to our goal.

A program of ZEIC, Carbon Leadership Forum British Columbia (CLF BC) is British Columbia’s centre of excellence for embodied carbon reduction. Focused on the carbon emissions attributed to construction materials and methods, it started off as a grassroots, volunteer-led initiative in 2019. In 2022, CLF BC was adopted by ZEIC and became part of a network of programs within ZEIC's Building Decarbonization team, demonstrating the significant role embodied carbon plays in decarbonizing the built environment.

ZEIC’s leadership recognizes the interconnected relationship and synergy between circular economy and embodied carbon, understanding that the lowest carbon buildings are the ones we already have. Advancing a circular economy in the built environment will extend the life of buildings and their materials, unlocking greater value for the carbon already emitted.

How do you feel that implementing circular solutions will benefit the built environment, communities, and Canada?

Applying circular economy principles to Canada’s building sector could generate multiple benefits, including reducing waste and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; improving the resiliency of supply chains; creating new economic, investment, and employment opportunities; enhancing natural ecosystems and urban green spaces; and providing greater social equity.

Builders, designers, and engineers seeking to reduce embodied carbon commonly refer to the Hierarchy of Net Zero Design, which suggests “using less stuff” as a category of action that includes highly effective embodied carbon reduction strategies.

At their core, these strategies embody circular principles, as they encourage design and construction approaches like repurpose and reuse.

A circular economy considers and supports cultural, environmental, social, and economic values and is restorative by design. Circular strategies and approaches applied to the built environment promote renewable inputs and seek to design out waste by keeping material and resources in use for as long as possible, retaining the value of construction materials that is currently being lost.

Carbon-conscious designers and builders recognize the opportunity to achieve meaningful embodied carbon reductions through building retrofit, adaptive reuse, design for disassembly, deconstruction, and reuse. If it is not feasible to renovate or rehabilitate an existing building, deconstruction would be the next best alternative, as it would allow for materials to be reintegrated into the marketplaces through reuse or upcycling.

Meeting housing demand requires a necessary change in building stock, but current practices result in large amounts of waste and associated social and environmental damage within the linear economy. The circular economy offers an alternative perspective by understanding a building’s end of use as the beginning of its next cycle.

Materials that become available at the end of a building’s service life would be recognized as valuable resources rather than waste, and their handling and treatment would be adjusted accordingly.

Shifting business-as-usual practices from demolition to deconstruction would also stimulate the economy by requiring the creation of green jobs and skills training, and result in the strengthening and transformation of the local workforce.

The circular economy offers an alternative perspective by understanding a building’s end of use as the beginning of its next cycle.

What do you consider to be your biggest success in advancing the circular economy in the built environment? Can you share any stories of impact your work has had that have surprised you?

We celebrated our fourth annual CLF BC Embodied Carbon Awards on May 21, 2026. Every year for the past four years, we bring changemakers from across BC’s zero-carbon buildings community together to celebrate outstanding individuals, projects, and organizations leading the way in reducing embodied carbon in our built environment.

One of the six categories awarded is Commitment to Circularity, which recognizes exceptional initiatives that embrace and tangibly advance circularity or circular concepts within the BC building sector. This category gives us the opportunity to elevate the embodied carbon reduction innovation and leadership demonstrated through the implementation of replicable circular strategies contributing to the advancement of built environment circularity. VEMA Deconstruction was the winner of this category this year, in recognition of their bold leadership in prioritizing deconstruction over demolition and recovery of high-value materials.

This year, we introduced the People’s Choice Award for inspiring collective action. Our intention was to stimulate engagement by providing attendees the opportunity to review poster boards that described the winning strategies for each category. The category that received the most support and ended up winning the award was VEMA Deconstruction—a clear sign of the excitement our community has when it comes to advancing circularity in the built environment!

What are some of the challenges you typically face working to advance the circular economy, especially within the built environment?

There are some misconceptions, both about embodied carbon and the circular economy, that we need to correct. There is a lot of jargon in our industry and, to some, “circularity” is just more of that. We need to continue building awareness around what “circular economy” means, and specifically, what that means in the context of the built environment. At CLF BC, we’re working on bridging the gap by defining those “use less stuff” strategies as circular strategies.

Engaging and collaborating with developers and building owners to address and reduce embodied carbon has proven to be challenging, as they are under the impression that this implies cost increases and will only add to the current affordability challenges felt across BC. The value proposition for reducing operational carbon has been more straightforward than it is for embodied carbon, and by extension, the circular economy. We need data-backed evidence that demonstrates the economic benefits of designing buildings that are durable, long-lasting, and adaptable.

Everything is under pressure to be done as quickly and low-cost as possible. Trying to get builders and designers to incorporate circular strategies in their process is difficult because it requires patience, collaboration, creativity, and coordination.

When it comes to reusing existing materials, we are trying to remove the barriers to deconstruction so that more reclaimed materials can be available. Leadership from developers will make a big impact on advancing deconstruction. The recent deconstruction of Saputo Dairy Plant is a fantastic example of this. This is one of the largest deconstruction projects in BC, and it is paving the way for a future of sustainable construction practices.

But not all developers will choose this of their own will. There’s a regulatory need for requiring deconstruction and material reclamation for new developments. There is also a need for upskilling the trades so demolition contractors can carry out building deconstruction and recover materials without damaging them in the process.

This also means we need to develop the physical and digital infrastructure, such as storage facilities and online marketplaces, so that reclaimed materials can be sorted, inventoried, and readily available to builders and designers for their next use. There are efforts across Canada to scale this infrastructure so that sourcing and building with reclaimed materials will be just as easy as it is with virgin materials.

Are there any upcoming initiatives, projects, trends, or advancements related to your work you'd like to share?

We want to tackle the challenges head on, understand them, and identify the solutions that will help overcome them so we can advance the circular economy in the built environment.

We are in the process of forming a Circularity Working Group with the objective of advancing circular initiatives across BC’s construction sector aligned with CLF BC’s goal of driving down embodied emissions in the built environment. The mission of the working group is to scale the policies, business models, and infrastructure that can support a circular economy for buildings, including the recovery and reuse of existing buildings and their materials.

The working group will connect and activate industry partnerships and unite stakeholders to accelerate the transition to a circular economy and influence industry transformation through advocacy, education, and real-world demonstration of projects that showcase the feasibility and benefits of circular solutions. Members of the working group will champion circularity as a key strategy to unlock high-impact embodied carbon reductions and focus on actions we can implement today to drive progress in circularity.

Our first year will focus on filling the gaps in embodied carbon analysis that demonstrate the reductions that can be achieved through deconstruction, reuse, and design for disassembly/adaptability (DfD/A). The aim is to provide clear, concise, and actionable guidance—backed by data—to help.

To that end, ZEIC is supporting the partnership between Light House and EcoWaste as they pursue a first-of-its-kind Circular Construction Campus and Centre for Training and Excellence in Metro Vancouver. The working group will capture findings from the feasibility study that Light House is conducting, which explores how the 200,000-square-foot EcoWaste site will be transformed into a hub that will salvage and repurpose discarded building materials as valuable inputs for new buildings.

The vision is to create a campus that will enable the diversion of tens of thousands of tonnes of wood from landfill each year, serve as an ecosystem for manufacturing feedstock, and create a space where practitioners can be educated on design and construction methods, empowering them to rethink the way they build to design out construction and demolition (C&D) waste and meaningfully cut embodied carbon.

Looking ahead, what are your hopes for the circular economy over the next decade, and how do you envision contributing to this vision? How can other individuals and organizations help support your mission and/or advance circularity in the built environment?

Developing, adopting, and supporting solutions that save energy, create jobs, support long-term affordability, and build a low-carbon, resilient future requires a sustained effort by all levels of government and the private sector.

We are committed to helping the City of Vancouver achieve its ambitious goal of reducing embodied carbon emissions by 40% by 2030.

CLF BC is also connected to the larger global network of the Carbon Leadership Forum, which brings together 5,000+ professionals from 2,500+ companies, 75+ countries, and 1,000+ cities around the world. We were the first Hub, and we had this incredible impact on the rest of the world!

The work that the City of Vancouver is doing to advance embodied carbon has influenced other jurisdictions in Canada and the rest of North America. If we can also advance the circular economy in the built environment in this region, there is no doubt that it will have a ripple effect.

We know that building less and using less stuff will allow us to drastically reduce embodied carbon, and that reducing the need for more construction and building materials corresponds to cost savings. It’s vital for developers and builders to understand that by elevating these strategies, we are not suggesting that development should be stopped, but rather that we need development to continue in a more sustainable and responsible way.

If we work together, we can find better approaches to the way new structures are built and maintained so that we set ourselves up for a future where “Build Nothing” and “Build Less” strategies are feasible, accessible, and the most economical solutions. If we can harmonize the goals of the various stakeholders, we will be able to do this.

When it comes to circularity, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. If achieved, we will see a future with less C&D waste, reduced embodied carbon, conservation of resources, flourishing natural ecosystems, affordable housing, and healthy and vibrant communities.

Check out CLF BC’s Resource Library at clfbritishcolumbia.com/resources.

Tune into the “Where Embodied Carbon Meets Circular Economy” replay to deepen your understanding of this crucial interrelationship at zebx.org/where-embodied-carbon-meets-circular-economy.