"co-operate": model for climate-friendly construction

A lot of wood helps save concrete: The beams and slabs of spruce wood for the wood-concrete ceiling of the new parking garage during assembly. Image: Empa

Minimize greenhouse gas emissions: This aspiration also shapes the designs of the new campus. The three-story building to the right of the entrance is a unique wood-concrete parking garage, the ceilings of which are a sophisticated construction of spruce beams and slabs overlaid with concrete. This hybrid construction method allowed the thickness of the concrete layers to be reduced to around one-third, according to construction company Implenia.

Around 9,300 square meters of concrete ribbed ceilings were replaced with wooden beam ceilings – also a contribution to the current trend to replace concrete, whenever possible and sensible, to a large extent with constructions made of wood.

According to Kevin Olas, Head of "Immobilien" at Empa, one of the challenging aspects of this project was the cleverly unobtrusive installation of lighting, electrical lines and wastewater pipes, so as not to detract from the aesthetics of this sophisticated hybrid construction.

In addition, the planning also had to take future aspects into account: With a view to climate change, the parking garage was planned as a modular structure made of demountable prefabricated parts – with a view to a more distant future, in which individual mobility may play a lesser role than it does today. In that case, parts of the structure could also be converted into workshops or for other purposes.

Urine as a raw material: Thanks to the so-called teapot effect, the NoMix toilet separates urine for recycling. Image: Eawag

In this future, environmentally friendly circular economy will also determine construction: Not only steel, concrete or wooden elements can be recycled in a climate-friendly way, but also human "raw materials". Take urine, for example: In the large laboratory building at the heart of co-operate, NoMix toilets have been installed, developed in recent years by experts from Eawag, the water research institute of the ETH Domain. Without changing the way they are normally used, they separate human urine from the so-called black water consisting of feces, flushing water and toilet paper.

Because urine contains valuable nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, it can be used to produce fertilizer for agriculture. In a process specially developed by Eawag, the raw material is first stabilized by a biological process in the basement of the NEST building, thus losing its strong odor.

An activated carbon filter removes all drug residues before the liquid is finally evaporated – to produce a high-quality fertilizer called Aurin, which is marketed by the Eawag spin-off Vuna GmbH. 1000 liters of urine produce 100 liters of fertilizer, which since 2018 has also been approved by the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture for use on edible plants.