Buildings as material mines - Towards digitalization of resource cadasters for circular economy

Book chapter, 2024

Existing buildings are valuable resources of secondary material, whose carefully planned recovery and reuse have the potential to decrease the construction industry’s resource use, waste generation, and associated embodied carbon emissions. To enable circular strategies, stakeholders across the value chain need varying types of information, including type, quantity, quality, and location of material and building components. The bottom-up approach used in material stock analysis (MSA) provides useful estimates of material stocks in buildings by applying average material quantities to typical buildings. But such results are too coarse to inform circular strategies – building-specific and component-level information is also needed. In that respect, data capture and artificial intelligence open many possibilities. This chapter investigates the level of information needed by stakeholders, and the potential of integrating machine learning, big data, and remote sensing into traditional MSA. The chapter also discusses how these approaches may be leveraged to automatically update buildings’ material and component information with the support of a digital twin platform, thereby facilitating the sharing of information with key stakeholders.