Institutionalization deficit, not a lack of will: reuse in retail fit-out is no longer a question of attitude — it’s a question of governance.
Reuse in commercial interior construction is already common practice — but it’s person-dependent, cost-driven, and undocumented.
That’s exactly why it remains a single-project phenomenon.
For retail chains with 20 or more locations, this means:
every rollout starts from technical zero, even though the company’s own portfolio already holds the material, components, and know-how to do otherwise.
This isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a governance problem.
The status quo: reuse is the rule, not the exception
In conversations with eleven decision-makers across expansion, construction, and sustainability — from CFO perspectives to ESG leads in retail — a consistent picture emerges:
shelving, checkout counters, lighting, and furniture are routinely reused.
The driver is almost never sustainability.
It’s cost pressure in an active rollout.
This matches an industry-wide finding: according to a PwC study on the construction industry, 76 percent of construction companies have not yet implemented compensation incentives to operationally anchor sustainability goals (PwC, 2025).
The pattern holds across the industry: reuse happens — but alongside the system, not through it.
Why it doesn’t scale: the governance split
The central finding from the interview series:
cost ownership and decision-making authority sit in different hands across most retail organizations.
In four of the eleven interviews, this split was explicitly documented — the budget for store construction sits with expansion or real estate, while the decision over material choice and deconstruction concepts lies with construction, store design, or external planners.
The result: reuse gets decided locally — by individual project managers who happen to know a material stockpile or maintain supplier contacts.
Once these people move on, the knowledge leaves with them. There’s no structural body that makes reuse binding across locations.
That’s the Institutionalisierungsdefizit (institutionalization deficit):
it’s not that cases are missing. It’s that process is missing.
The aggregation gap: why individual projects never become portfolio knowledge
Even where reuse is documented, it stays at the object level.
Existing circular-construction valuation models — such as the residual-value approach from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Arup — consistently calculate at the level of a single building.
For a portfolio with dozens or hundreds of locations, the aggregation step is missing:
there’s no format that makes reuse data from Project A usable for planning Project B.
A parallel finding from structural engineering confirms the pattern outside retail:
the 2025 guideline on reusing load-bearing components, published by KIT and the state of Baden-Württemberg, shows that the testing effort required for reused components depends almost entirely on the documentation quality of the donor building (nbau.org, 2025).
Without consistent data management, every instance of reuse remains a case-by-case review — in structural engineering as much as in retail fit-out.
There’s also a technical dimension that’s often overlooked in this discussion:
reuse requires Sortenreinheit (material purity) — clearly separable materials that aren’t glued or bonded together — and Kreislaufkompatibilität (circularity compatibility), meaning a construction that considers disassembly from the outset.
Both are rarely planned systematically in existing shopfitting concepts, because that decision gets made at the design stage — the point at which no one is yet thinking about later reuse.
The blind spot on the balance sheet: residual-value risk in tenant improvements
Tenant improvements are depreciated on the commercial balance sheet according to building-level rules — regardless of when the actual store renovation happens.
This creates a structural gap between the depreciation end date on the books and the actual timing of the store renovation:
a store fit-out can be fully depreciated on paper while it’s still running economically and functionally
— or it can be technically renewed before depreciation ends.
This decoupling is why the residual value of tenant improvements so often goes unresolved at the end of a lease:
unrealized capital that shows up in no governance logic anywhere.
Classic life-cycle cost models (LCC/TCO) don’t help here, because they assume continuous ownership and long time horizons
— neither of which fits the lease-driven rollout cycles of retail.
What one current flagship project shows — and doesn’t yet show
The LOOP Markt in Haimhausen (Dachau district), developed by Ratisbona Handelsimmobilien for Edeka Südbayern, is announced as Germany’s first supermarket built consistently on cradle-to-cradle principles:
1,185 m² of retail space, non-destructive deconstruction via plug connections instead of adhesives, more than 250 products tested for material health, documented through a digital Circularity Passport. Topping-out was celebrated in August 2026, with opening planned for Q4 2026 (Ratisbona).
The developer’s starting position is notable:
Ratisbona has already built more than 50 stores using standardized timber construction — production-ready, cheaper than solid construction, with documented CO₂ savings.
Scaling is clearly achievable for this company in principle.
Yet with the LOOP concept — digital material passport, verified circularity — Haimhausen is still the first location.
That this exact question has just landed industry-wide is visible on the calendar: at the International Cradle to Cradle Congress on September 17–18, 2026, in Berlin, Ratisbona is discussing — alongside dm and the Rewe Group — precisely how circular construction can move from niche prototype to industry standard (c2c-congress.org, 2026).
Even the developer behind the most visible reference project right now is publicly confronting the exact question this article raises. That confirms the thesis more precisely than a blanket critique could: a single flagship object proves that circular construction works technically.
Whether and how it becomes a portfolio-wide governance instrument is — by the industry’s own assessment — still open.
What would actually be needed
Circular construction in retail fit-out isn’t a design topic or a sustainability project — it’s a question of capital governance.
Restwertrückführung (residual-value feedback) carries the logic of existing valuation models over into the reality of retail portfolios:
it deliberately forgoes the complexity of object-level methods and instead makes the residual value of tenant improvements manageable at the portfolio level — as a metric that feeds into rollout decisions instead of disappearing into fixed-asset accounting.
How this governance model works in detail is the subject of the next post in this series.
Conclusion
Whoever reuses is usually already doing a lot right.
The problem isn’t with the projects — it’s that no organization turns individual projects into a system.
Governance split, aggregation gap, and a blind spot on the balance sheet keep reuse a matter of chance instead of a standard.
For portfolios of 20 or more locations, that’s not a sustainability deficit. It’s unused governance potential.
