Recently, Brent Trenga, Kingspan’s Director of Sustainability for North America, and Emmy Funk, Sustainability Manager for Kingspan Insulated Panels North America, hit the road to attend two major conferences: Living Future 2024 and GreenBiz Circularity 2024. Each year, these conferences provide great opportunities for participants to network, learn and collaborate on advancing solutions for a more sustainable and equitable world.

Below are some of Brent’s and Emmy’s key takeaways and perspectives from Living Future and GreenBiz Circularity.

Living Future 2024: Change Starts Here

This year, the International Living Future Institute’s (ILFI) 18th annual Living Future conference was held in Atlanta, marking the first time the event was hosted in the Southeast region of the U.S. Themed “Change Starts Here,” Living Future 2024 (LF24) served as an immersive exploration into the interconnected principles of the regenerative movement and catalyzed discussions around tackling the most pressing challenges at the intersection of climate, health and equity.

According to ILFI, this event draws a diverse and impactful community of thought leaders and change agents all actively engaged in the built environment sector, including facility owners and operators, real estate developers, AEC professionals, product manufacturers, policy makers, interior designers, educators, and advocates for regenerative development.

Key takeaways:

Common materials framework

Discussion centered on efforts to promote the common material framework (CMF), which is essentially a blueprint of which material attributes support sustainability and created by the mindfulMATERIALS ecosystem. The CMF is the outcome of a detailed cross-stakeholder industry effort to analyze and organize more than 150 of the most common building product ecolabels and standards. Conference participants emphasized the importance of unified standards among all stakeholders including owners, design professionals and contractors. This is the basis for the building industry’s first common language for sustainable building products.

Social and environmental equity

Conference sessions also addressed the topics of social equity, social justice, and environmental equity. Accountability and how industries can work together to create equitable and regenerative development were major points of discussion. Conference participants also explored ideas related to leveraging circularity to create jobs and using data to guide and measure equitable and regenerative development performance.

Monetizing sustainability

The issue of how to monetize and communicate the value of sustainability to the investor community was another key discussion at LF24. Investors are increasingly paying more attention to sustainability as more tenants are requiring increasingly ambitious scope 1, 2 or 3 targets. Investment in sustainable projects is also ramping up as the risk of investing in these projects decreases and incentives such as tax exemptions and low interest loans become available.

GreenBiz Circularity 2024

GreenBiz Circularity 2024 brought together nearly 2,000 people dedicated to building a circular economy, moving beyond incremental action, and accelerating the circular economy.

As the leading conference for professionals building the circular economy, the conference attracts professionals in the areas of corporate strategy, sustainability product design, sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, finance, as well as entrepreneurs, nonprofits and trade associations, investors, public agencies and policy experts.

Key takeaways

The future of circular building materials

GreenBiz Circularity 2024 featured a Building Product Forum that explored crucial topics ranging from product design, manufacturing, reverse logistics, and the essential infrastructure needed for a thriving circular building ecosystem. Kingspan’s Brent Trenga was invited by James Ball, Director of Buildings at GreenBiz Group, to speak at this invitation-only, half-day gathering of professionals from leading organizations supporting the transition to a circular future for buildings. 

Brent’s session focused on a reality check for circularity. He stressed that everyone at the conference was there because circularity has not been solved. He explored how the industry can work together to develop products and scale solutions that contribute to a more circular economy. He noted that while different projects aimed at advancing circularity are more hyper local and regional, efforts need to ramp up. Implementing circularity at scale is necessary to result in meaningful change. An entire ecosystem of stakeholders is needed to make circularity work.

Solving for the waste crisis 

Discussions also focused on the massive public health crisis related to how waste is disposed of and how businesses and governments can collaborate to solve this mounting crisis. Circularity can mitigate waste – this could go a long way toward solving the waste crisis and result in positive public health outcomes.

While more data is becoming available to educate people, there is no circularity without healthy materials. While some manufacturers are still producing materials with unhealthy chemicals that enter waste streams, the time is coming when there won’t be options for toxic building products.

The supply chain challenge

One of the big challenges looming when it comes to advancing the circular economy is the supply chain. Embedding circularity in the supply chain relies on transparency and working with suppliers to decarbonize each link in the value chain. The European Union’s (EU) Digital Product Passport (DPP), part of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), aims to increase supply chain transparency. The regulation requires companies to disclose data on raw material extraction, production, recycling, and more.

Companies need to work with their suppliers now to ensure their supplies chains are circular and futureproof supply chains for emerging sustainability issues.

That’s a wrap

While that’s a wrap on this year’s LF24 and GreenBiz Circularity 2024, Kingspan never stops working to make meaningful and positive change related to many of the global issues highlighted in these conferences. The company’s 10-year Planet Passionate sustainability program is making strides on tackling the global challenges of climate change, circularity and protection of the natural world.