Facade Leasing Demonstrator Project

The built environment is a major contributor to climate-change and other environmental degradation indicators on a global scale. The increasing demand for energy and resources required to meet the needs of growing urban populations with rising living standards, together with the deteriorating condition of the existing building stock, are set to increase this negative environmental impact even further in the coming decades. Innovative business and supply models are needed to revert this process, enabling a Circular Economy transition in which economic growth and rising living standards are decoupled from accelerating primary material extraction and waste generation.

The Façade Leasing Demonstrator Project is the third stage in an innovation series supported by EIT Climate-KIC since 2015. It explores the implementation of a circularity-enabling business model for the performance contracting of energy-efficient building envelopes.

The current project stage focuses on identifying practical barriers to the implementation of Product-Service Systems, such as Facades-as-a-Service, in the Dutch and European construction sectors. It does so by studying four different perspectives of the Circular Economy transition in the context of façade contracting: Financing, management, technology, and building law. It then proposes targeted solutions to overcome barriers in these different fields, based on lessons learnt from the development of a Façade Leasing Demonstrator project – currently under construction – at the building of the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geo-sciences, at TU Delft. The outcome of the project is the elaboration of a “Façade Leasing model contract”, founded on the principles of long-term collaboration and the sharing of aligned economic and ecologic incentive between real estate operators (clients) and Facades-as-a-Service providers (suppliers).

This strategy could decrease the initial investment required for the renovation and construction of high-performance building envelopes. This could, in turn, increase the rate and depth of technical improvement in both new buildings and building energy renovations, leading to the update of a large volume of buildings across Europe which are in urgent need of technical retrofit. Façade Leasing could, meanwhile, accelerate the market uptake of new building technologies, and optimize the reuse and recycling of components and materials within the construction industry, by keeping these technologies in the hands of their manufacturers.