Swan-certified houses in Hafnarfjörður

Rentur ehf

Recently, the construction project of two apartment buildings received the first Swan Certification in Hafnarfjörður according to the new construction criteria.

The project owner - Rentur ehf, included a few circular practices in the project, such as: 

1) Design that took into account reducing material consumption and emissions, including using standard sizes of CLT units to reduce cuts and the number of fasteners between units.

2) Reuse of paving slabs, concrete reinforcement bars, sheet metal columns, big bags, stones, and soil from the site by cleaning stones on site.

3) Waste was sorted into 22 categories, including usable leftovers of building materials that were either sold or donated. Care was also taken to return all excess building materials to suppliers. All rock wool offcuts were donated and used for other projects.

From an economic perspective, sorting waste and determining how it could be reused was a lot of work, and the operation was costly, says one of the project owners, Ingimundur Þór Þorsteinsson - “It would be much easier if there was a common platform where owners of recyclable materials and potential users of these could connect.” Ingimundur also mentions the conservative approach of some stakeholders and their opposition to changing working methods. However, he believes that environmentally friendly methods will soon become part of the general construction process. “Once upon a time, cars had no seat belts, but today, no car is sold without a seat belt. Now, the same thing is happening in the construction industry. In the near future, it will be mandatory to build buildings following current environmental certification standards; otherwise, they will be seen as ‘cars without seat belts.’ It is good to prepare for that”, says Ingimundur.

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