CIRCULAR ECONOMY ASSESSMENT IN DIFFERENT SCALES OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT. Impacts and Sustainable Strategies

A sustainable development plan is indispensable to guarantee a resilient environment, and to drive this transition the United Nations individualized 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Circular Economy (CE) addresses the same critical areas (economic, social and ecological) and researches demonstrated that it is of great contribution to achieving a significant number of SDGs targets. One of the sectors that CE focuses on improving is the built environment, so to examine it from a broader perspective, this paper focuses on three scales of intervention: the micro-scale of materials use and reuse (linked to SDGs 9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and 12. Responsible Consumption and Production); the meso-scale of the buildings to improve energy efficiency (linked to SDG 7. Affordable and Clean Energy); and the macro-scale of the urban environment and the benefits of naturebased strategies to compensate ecological impacts (linked to SDG 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities). It was observed that there is a lack of knowledge about natural systems in urban areas, so the recommendation is to encourage further research with an interdisciplinary framework.