Eurac Research is a private research center headquartered in Bolzano, South Tyrol. The center has eleven institutes and five centers. Eurac Research has more than 800 partners spread across 56 countries. Eurac Research collaborates with international organizations such as the Alpine and Carpathian Conventions, UNEP and UNIDO in the context of sustainable development and energy technology, and also hosts the headquarters of the Permanent Secretariat of the Alpine Convention at its headquarters in Bolzano. Core funding is provided by the autonomous province of South Tyrol, with additional financing coming from membership fees and European project funds.
Circularity is increasingly recognised as a critical paradigm for sustainability in the built environment, yet existing efforts to assess it-whether focused on material flow analysis, design-for-disassembly strategies, durability metrics, or carbon accounting-remain fragmented and operate at different scales. Despite numerous indicator sets, the literature lacks an integrated framework that combines both technical design factors and the enabling organisational conditions required to support circular outcomes at the building level. This paper introduces CircularB-DfC (CircularB COST Action - Design for Circularity), a decision-Support Tool with a structured matrix for prioritising building design factors to enhance circular material flows. The framework consolidates insights from a systematic literature review and a multi-stage expert engagement process, resulting in 35 technical indicators and 20 enabling factors. These are organised into four technical categories: Material Selection; Design for Disassembly; Embodied Energy and Carbon Footprint; Waste Minimisation, and one enabling category, Circular Construction Management, including Governance, Certification, Stakeholder Engagement, Digitalisation, and Socio-economic aspects. Indicators and enablers are aggregated into a Design Score and an Enabler Score to support early decision-making. The tool was applied to three illustrative scenarios: a reinforced-concrete industrial hall in the Western Balkans, a steel office building in Central Europe, and a timber residential project in East London. The steel scenario achieved the highest Design and Enabler Scores, the concrete scenario performed strongest in Waste Minimisation through prefabrication and site-based strategies, and the timber scenario scored lowest overall due to limited reuse and disassembly provisions in the original design. While CircularB-DfC offers a simple and transparent basis for integrating circularity in design, it is limited by the subjectivity of expert-based weighting and its static structure. Future research will focus on dynamic modelling, integration with digital tools, and broader validation to enhance applicability.
Artificial leaves emulate biological leaves by converting photonic energy into chemical energy, yet replicating photosynthetic functionalities at the molecular level remains a challenge. Key limitations of current artificial leaves include (1) recombination in photosensitizers and (2) photooxidation of the photosensitizers, (3) inefficient electron and proton transfer to reaction centers, and (4) limited scalability of the illuminated surface area. Herein, we address these challenges by mimicking the thylakoid membrane, nature's photosynthetic machinery, in a simplified system using an electropolymerized ultrathin polydopamine (PDA) nanosheet embedded with CdSe@CdS nanorods (NRs) as photosensitizers and cobaloximes as hydrogen evolution catalysts. The PDA nanosheet provides essential functions of the thylakoid membrane: it suppresses recombination through rapid electron acceptance, facilitates efficient electron transport, and mitigates photooxidation of photosensitizers within an ultrathin layer, as demonstrated by photoelectrochemical analysis, transient absorption spectroscopy, and scanning electrochemical microscopy. These findings lay the groundwork for designing artificial thylakoid membranes, advancing the development of next-generation materials for efficient energy conversion, and addressing some of the fundamental limitations of current artificial leaf systems.
