The Municipality of Drammen, located in South-Eastern Norway, is home to more than 100,000 inhabitants. It has gone from being an industrial city struggling with pollution to becoming a vibrant, liveable and green municipality. As a Mission-minded city, Drammen aims to reduce its direct greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030. Its Climate Strategy for 2030 focuses on mobility, buildings, land use, and resource efficiency, while aiming to make the municipality a role model and emphasising the importance of collective action involving a broad spectrum of stakeholders.
Key elements of Drammen's strategic priorities are integrated into the NetZeroCities Pilot Activity - Zero Emission 2030. In the Pilot, the city applies an evidence-based approach to tackling real-world urban challenges spanning five domains: green (solar) energy, circular economy, shared economy, mobility, and citizen health and well-being. As Drammen also aims to become a pioneer of the circular economy, the piloting results on circular business models for construction goods are particularly interesting.
Circular Business Model
Activities within the NetZeroCities Pilot focusing on circularity are part of a wider initiative in the Drammen region, called ReUseNOW!, led by Green Growth Drammen (Grønn Vekst Drammen), a private-public ecosystemic initiative built around collaboration between the Drammen Chamber of Commerce, Municipality of Drammen, the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN), and regional businesses. The overall objective of ReUseNOW! is to develop a regional circular market for construction goods by introducing several circular business models and market scaling instruments.
The Pilot employed ecosystemic method, introducing and combining design thinking, lean and iterative development, and chaos piloting into private-public cooperation. This approach enabled building a comprehensive understanding of the flow of operations for the reuse of construction goods and identifying significant barriers that make it difficult for individuals and companies to access and utilise reusable materials.
The next logical step was to design a model to improve the operational flow and test it in real-life scenarios. The core elements of the proposed circular business model for construction goods include:
- Connecting to a national partner operating in several other locations and with a digital marketplace.
- Introducing a hybrid (digital/physical) marketplace in the region, ensuring that as much as possible is traded digitally, while still making it possible to store goods in a physical place if needed.
- Aligning the reuse and recycling of construction goods in one pathway or flow of operations to remove silos.
- Embracing an iterative development process to enable responsiveness to constant changes.
- Developing other elements with regional businesses and the municipality, needed to establish a sustainable and scalable market, and raising the necessary capital for these development projects.
Hybrid Marketplace for Construction Goods
To test the business model, Green Growth Drammen partnered with SIRKEN, Norway's leading platform for circular resource utilisation in the construction industry, and secured additional funding to launch a pilot. On May 7, 2025, a physical marketplace was opened in Drammen, connecting it to both a digital platform and 17 other reuse hubs across Norway.
The concept of the marketplace enables players in the construction industry to sign agreements for delivering new and used surplus goods. The goods are made available on the digital marketplace, where both private individuals and companies can buy them at a reasonable price. The buyers collect the goods themselves at the physical marketplace, which is self-service and available 24/7.
Digital Platform for "Donor Buildings"
To improve the information flow, Green Growth Drammen also developed the digital platform for early engagement and information for sourcing: Donorbyggene ("Donor buildings"). This solution makes it transparent to the market stakeholders which goods are entering the market. Real estate owners can register the buildings to be transformed and specify the goods that will be available. Traders, architects and developers can get in touch and secure these goods before they become waste. This solution will be used for future development, aiming to collect the information from the mandatory mapping registration and distribute it using AI.
What were the key drivers of the initiative?
- Strategy: The Municipality of Drammen has outlined its climate goals in the Climate Strategy for 2030, while business development is a central focus of the Strategic Business Plan for Drammen 2023–2027. Both strategies include circularity or circular business models as one of their tasks or objectives.
- Private-public cooperation: Most green change needs to happen in businesses. Therefore, Drammen municipality has established Green Growth Drammen together with other key ecosystem stakeholders. Through the cooperation, over 60 businesses are involved in different projects. ReUseNOW! has involved more than 20 businesses and organisations. These include real estate developers, architects, construction companies, and producers of building materials – all key stakeholders in the flow of operations for the reuse of construction goods, enabling a regional partnership.
- Iterative development: By accepting the terms of innovation, the Piloting team introduced the native innovation tools to the public-private cooperation arena. It means that we have not only used frameworks but also placed projects in the private arena instead of the public, which has set the public free from their normal mindsets, formal requirements, long-term planning, and processes.
What were the challenges and barriers?
- Funding: The NetZeroCities Pilot Cities Programme could only partially fund the development and piloting of the circular business model for the reuse of construction goods. Therefore, Green Growth Drammen had to work on securing additional funding parallel to the project.
- Scaling for impact: Few businesses are interested in symbolic pilots. Therefore, the Pilot team had to prove the value of taking part in the project by demonstrating a plan for scaling the Pilot to a real market. It meant attracting further funding from regional, national, or international sources to enable a fundamental shift in operational flow, resulting in measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
- Public acceptance: There's a gap between the willingness to support R&D or Pilot projects and the willingness to support circular commercial capacities crucial for the market dynamic. The challenge is particularly evident when the main stakeholders are larger corporations with the capacity to fund their development projects. However, the development needed to make a shift in the market, demand a long-term perspective, while being high-risk. Thus, public authorities have to show a willingness to invest to enable development that meets the public needs.
Potential for Replication
The circular business model is designed as a framework to be replicated by other cities in Norway or Europe. For example, Oulu, Drammen's Twin City, is also actively working on enabling the reuse of building materials. Inspired by Drammen, Oulu aims to establish a concept and cluster for the reuse of building materials, encompassing both physical and digital material banks.
Replicable practices:
- SIRKEN, a circular resource utilisation platform, is growing fast in Norway. It could be introduced in other European countries and scaled as a European network of regional hubs and a shared digital market.
- The platform for registering donor buildings and available goods could be used in other cities and countries.
- The iterative cooperation method for public-private innovation can be applied to other areas or domains of green transition. Drammen has already done it in the area of green mobility, green district development, and green energy.
Key lessons learned
- Employing an iterative and user-centric development process is key to successful public-private innovation.
- Businesses already possess the necessary operational knowledge that they are happy to share with others. However, they cannot enable change alone. Therefore, taking on a leadership role and incentivising action can lead to change and new ways of working.
- Opening doors and breaking down silos is crucial for building new partnerships and business models. Although it's not the norm, sometimes public organisations need to step outside their comfort zone and work in the grey zone to facilitate change.