RECONSTRUCT at Sustainable Places 2026: from waste characterisation to circular value chains
Press release
Two project partners will pitch in Luxembourg on 2 December, in the session “Resilient, Circular and High-Performance Buildings”
Luxembourg, 11 November 2026. Making construction circular depends on two things, among others: knowing what materials are available for reuse, and making sure that knowledge travels with them from one actor to the next along the value chain. Two RECONSTRUCT partners will address both sides of this challenge at Sustainable Places 2026, the annual conference on research and innovation for the built environment, held at the European Convention Center Luxembourg from 2 to 4 December.
On Wednesday 2 December, from 16:00 to 17:30 (CET) in Auditorium 1, Gloria Cosoli (eCampus University) and Giovanni Amigoni (Fondazione ICONS) will present their contributions during the Session 1 “Resilient, Circular and High-Performance Buildings” in Thematic Track 1 Built Environment & Digital Systems.
Gloria Cosoli will present how RECONSTRUCT combines artificial intelligence with RGB imaging, infrared thermography and hyperspectral sensing to characterise construction and demolition waste. Each technique captures different features of a material, from its appearance to its chemical composition, including contaminants that can prevent reuse. The project has tested these methods on data and samples collected at partner construction and waste-management sites, with the aim of giving recyclers and builders faster, more reliable information on the quality of secondary materials.
Giovanni Amigoni will share a diagnostic developed by Fondazione ICONS across 22 EU-funded projects, including RECONSTRUCT. The analysis identifies recurring failures at the handover points between actors in construction and renovation value chains, where value is lost and circularity breaks down. These gaps help explain why promising circular solutions struggle to scale beyond individual pilots and highlight that this is a workflow problem, rather than a technical one.
Are you attending Sustainable Places 26? Join the session on 2 December!
About RECONSTRUCT
RECONSTRUCT is a four-year Horizon Europe Innovation Action (June 2023 to May 2027) coordinated by the Institut de Tecnologia de la Construcció de Catalunya (ITeC). Fourteen beneficiaries and two associated partners from six countries work together to help designers, builders and waste managers reuse CDW and reduce the use of virgin materials, demonstrating the approach in two buildings in Brussels and Barcelona.
To follow the project, visit reconstruct-project.eu and follow RECONSTRUCT on LinkedIn