Espoo’s future demolition projects to put more emphasis on circular economy and sustainability
Espoo’s Tilapalvelut (Premises Department public utility) is looking for innovative operators for its new demolition framework agreement. The competitive tendering of the framework agreement emphasises criteria relating to the circular economy, in particular. The aim set is sorting all material resulting from demolition and increasing cooperation between contracting parties in order to improve the overall recycling rate of all contracts awarded by Espoo.
Espoo Tilapalvelut has launched a framework agreement procurement, which will be used as the basis for awarding various contracts on the demolition of buildings and structures owned by the City of Espoo, the related structural and technical construction and alteration works, as well as the controlled sorting, recycling and reuse of the resulting demolition and construction material by means of project-specific contracts. The work may also include the removal of invasive alien species and the removal and treatment of contaminated soils.
‘Framework agreement’ refers to an agreement between the City of Espoo and one or more suppliers, the purpose of which is to establish the prices, planned quantities and other terms and conditions for procurement contracts to be concluded within a certain period of time. The procurement value of the framework agreement for demolition projects is approximately 4 million euros per year. The framework agreement is concluded for four years at a time.
Every year, the city demolishes dozens of buildings, such as disused schools, health centres or offices, for various reasons. There are usually several reasons for demolishing a building: structures are in poor condition, renovation would be expensive, the building has been empty for a long time and not suited to the city’s activities, or the owner of buildings in poor condition on the city’s leased land surrendered them to the city without payment.
Cooperation gives leverage for change
During the contract period, the general objective is to develop operations together to increase the overall recycling rate of all contracts ordered by the City of Espoo from the current state. The contractor must commit to a minimum requirement of 70% for overall recycling and recovery. The target sorting rate is 100%. The binding overall recycling share is continuously tracked with consolidated reports for each project. In procurement, the recycling rate includes the direct reuse or recycling of material into new products.
“Getting a wide range of actors involved would be ideal. The framework agreement tenderer could be, for example, a joint venture of companies specialising in the recycling of movable property, the reuse of building elements and conventional demolition. This would allow us to cover all the stages of demolition and recycle materials as efficiently as possible,” says Vesa Pyy, Structural Manager of Tilapalvelut.
The most important factor in a conventional procurement is price. The framework procurement is unique in its emphasis on material recycling: the better material recycling percentage the tenderer can achieve, the higher its quality score and chance of winning the competitive tendering. The quality of recycling also matters – a higher score is awarded for the reuse of entire building elements than for the recycling of crushed materials. The tendering marking criteria are split 80% quality to 20% price.
“We evaluate the further recyclability of materials as well as how they should be improved to be more reusable. A lot of dialogue with other experts is still needed before we can achieve the targeted 100% sorting rate,” says Pyy.
The City of Espoo has committed to the Green Deal for Sustainable Demolition(external link, opens in a new window). We aim to promote the circular economy in our demolition projects and to utilise the material released in demolition by promoting the reuse of materials and by recycling demolition products. Voluntary Green Deal commitments are steering instruments between the state and the business sector or, for example, the municipal sector. By making a commitment, companies, municipalities, government organisations and NGOs can set targets for their own efforts to promote and enable sustainable development.
Procurement documents can be found in Cloudia(external link, opens in a new window) (in Finnish only).