Matti Kuittinen
On sustainable building, life-cycles, and closing the loop
Matti Kuittinen is a Senior Ministerial Advisor at the Ministry of the Environment of Finland – where he develops policies for life-cycle assessment and circular economies in the built environment. His latest book Carbon: A Field Manual for Building Designers hit shelves this past fall. Matti joined forces with architects Andrew Ruff and Alan Organschi to create a manual for makers. Trained as an architect, Matti also teaches in the Department of Architecture at Aalto University. It is in the classrooms of Aalto that our conversation began.
The inspiration for the book came primarily from Matti’s students. They were interested in understanding the relationships between buildings and climate, and looked to him for answers. Matti had the information, having devoured stacks of books on the subject, but realized that these resources didn’t speak his students’ language. Their complex, wordy, and often cryptic nature was unsuitable for architects or students of architecture.
Matti and his partners set off to change that – creating a new manual on carbon, life-cycle assessment, and sustainable design for makers, by makers. They use clear case studies, illustrations, and diagrams to communicate the relationships between building and climate. The book’s goal is to grow climate literacy among designers, not necessarily life-cycle analysis expertise.
We don’t all need to be “LCA nerds” to have an impact.
A self-described nerd for the nitty-gritty of environmental design, Matti believes we shouldn’t waste our limited brain cells on something that machines could handle more effectively. We should be pairing a fundamental understanding of carbon and life-cycles with powerful computational technology – where designers are interpreting the results of BIM-based assessments that do all the dirty work. Just as we don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive a car, architects could use LCA tools without mastering their intricacies.
Of course, we still need experts to help create the tools and orchestrate the larger policies around sustainable building practices. A perfect fit with his background in architectural science and engineering, Matti has found his place among the conductors at the Ministry.
The Ministry of the Environment is one of twelve in the Finnish Government, responsible for preparing matters on the built environment, natural resources, and environmental protection for the Government and Parliament. They keep environmental considerations at the heart of social decision-making and work towards achieving the country’s ambitious carbon goals. Finland is aiming to transform into a circular-based economy and achieve carbon neutrality by 2035.
The construction and building sectors are huge levers for moving the country towards their climate goals. The built environment consumes 50% of Finland’s raw materials and 40% of their energy – producing over ⅓ of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions in the process. Finland recently updated their National Architectural Policy Programme to reshape their future of building towards high-quality, sustainable architecture. Proposed provisions expand emission control to the entire lifespan of the building, control emissions from the building materials, and support better utilization of demolition materials. These values, practices, and goals are being explicitly interwoven into the DNA of Finnish architecture.
The movement isn’t only aimed at architecture. Launched in 2010, a national early-education program introduces almost all of Finland’s sixth-graders to circular economies though a giant simulation. In it, each student performs a job in a different business based on a real-life company. The exercise illustrates the concepts of waste and reuse across the economy’s many sectors. The country is planting the seeds, year after year, to make the transition to a circular economy possible.
Finland is trying to bend the traditional linear process of construction consumption back on itself, but a circular economy is easier illustrated than implemented. Matti has found a sticking point with the European Union’s Certified Product Regulations (CPR) – which set the ground rules for construction materials allowed to flow between member states. This was a serious bottleneck for reusing materials, as the CPR wouldn’t recognize their certifications. Questions of legality and responsibility for used products muddied the waters.
Increased pressure to adopt circular processes pushed the EU to revise the CPR to promote circular businesses this past December. Matti and his team are working on having mandatory environmental declarations (EPDs) included in product requirements while continuing to remove the legal barriers to a more circular economy.
I asked Matti about some criticism I had read on circular economies: namely, that considering waste as a resource may paradoxically increase demand for waste instead of reducing its volumes. He agreed that the circular economy doesn’t really address consumption, and maybe it doesn’t need to. There is so much work yet to be done to address our waste, that criticizing the concept today is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He cited the graph below – where only a sliver of the total material we process is reused. Matti believes we can concurrently address resource efficiency, sufficiency, and consumption while building a more circular economy.
Material flow diagram, European Union - year 2021, thousand tonnes. Source: Eurostat
The building products of the future should either be reused or renewable, and the best options will be both. When asked about timber, Matti noted the huge opportunity and responsibility of Finland’s forests. He also mentioned shorter-rotation materials like straw, hemp, and reed, but noted the difficulties of “plugging-in” any renewable resource into market-based volatility. With supply and demand of species in constant flux, how can we know what a “sustainable” level of harvest is? Adding complexity is the fact that mineral-based materials, the lion’s share of our built environment, are the easiest to recycle. These two flows begin to tangle as their contradictions come to light.
Without a political will of steadily rising and predictable environmental taxes added to products and production, all the good work done for improving efficiencies and minimizing the amount of waste may not reach far enough.
- From Carbon: A Field Manual for Building Designers
When the concept of reuse grows to the scale of a country, continent, or world, things get messy — but Matti embraces the mess. He recognizes that through the complexities of research, politics, and policy we can make lasting progress on these challenges. The next generation is enthusiastic to tackle these challenges too, and it is in their enthusiasm that Matti finds hope for the future of building. They are the ones who will inherit our world, disassemble our buildings, and fell the trees we plant. By passing on his knowledge and values to the next generation, he is doing his best, as a circular-economy expert would, to close the loop.
What I’m Reading
Carbon: A Field Manual for Building Designers by Alan Organschi, Matti Kuittinen, and Andrew Ruff
The description: A manual for makers on carbon in construction and design. If you want to learn more about Matti’s ideas, plus many other topics in the same orbit, check out the book!
Check out my recommended reading list for a collection of my favorite books and upcoming reads - updated weekly.
See you next week,
Tom