With the phase-out of coal mining in the Rhenish mining area as part of the energy transition, the region is facing the task of fundamental structural change. A central element to this is the creation and development of sustainable employment. The area considers itself a model region for a successful transformation in the fields of climate protection, sustainable use of resources and circular economy. To this end, the establishment of trade and industry is to be promoted. On the one hand, this means that new industrial and commercial areas must be designated on a large scale – and on the other, that these should be built as sustainably as possible. The project is one of the anchor projects for structural change designated by the state government and contributes to above-mentioned challenges in three steps:
- Development of a catalogue containing resource and climate protection measures that take the planning, construction and operational phases into account.
- Quantification of these measures in terms of their ecological effectiveness.
- Design of a point-based system for pragmatic classification of the ecological effectiveness of said measures.
Similar optimisations have already been successfully realised for residential construction using the Factor-X methodology. However, this is not expedient for the construction of new industrial and commercial areas, because the structures involved are more complex and because the usage patterns of commercial and industrial areas differ greatly from those in residential construction.
The researchers at the Wuppertal Institute are involved in the project to develop a corresponding sustainability assessment scheme with a point-based system for assessing measures in order to support the implementation of the resource transition. In particular, they are developing a user-friendly method for calculating the material footprint.
The assessment approach will be applied as an example in three industrial sites in the Rhenish mining area – in Eschweiler and Inden within the Weisweiler industrial hub as well as in Bedburg.