“Waste is Material without an Identity” – Thomas Rau, architect
Our planet is a closed system with finite resources. The current economic system is strongly based on consuming and discarding materials and products. Combined with the growing population and strong economic growth this leads to a rapid depletion of the earth’s valuable resources while creating huge amounts of waste. We consume materials at a rate that requires 6 Earths by 2050 to meet our current demand for resources. Continuing our current way of living and consuming, all our critical materials will be depleted within 10 to 50 years from now, leading to severe economic scarcity. Therefore, it is critical to change our current linear economy and move towards a sustainable circular economy in which resources are reused and recycled while eliminating the production of waste. Looking beyond the current ‘take, make, use and dump’ extractive industrial model, the circular economy is restorative and regenerative by design. Relying on system-wide innovation, the circular economy aims to redefine products and services to create resources from waste, while minimising negative impacts. The economic value of creating such a circular economy can increase the efficiency of resource use with up to 3% annually. This may not seem like much, but this adds up to benefits of €1.8 trillion by 2030 in Europe alone.
A surge of initiatives that aim to make the move toward more sustainable circular models of reuse and recycling have been launched in recent years. However, most of the circular initiatives failed to create sustainable material cycles due to a lack of usable information on material contents and manner of construction. This information is of utmost importance to allow re-use and recycling of materials and thus, to maintain the material’s value. Consequently, this will result in the thoughtful deconstruction of products, maintaining their valuable materials and subsequent re-use or recycling, minimizing waste.
The aim of this Madaster project is to provide a disruptive and vital innovation towards a circular economy by providing the necessary material and product information through the Madaster platform.
To achieve this, the following project objectives are defined:
1. Produce Material Passports of construction objects in an operational setting. These Material Passports contain:
- an overview of products, components and materials used in a specific construction object;
- a current financial valuation of those products and materials;
- an assessment of the share of value that can be retained when a building is deconstructed (circular value).
2. Develop protocols for data extraction and integration of resource-related information of construction.
3. Create an open-standard IT infrastructure to enhance interoperability with other systems that will make use of the resource-related information of construction objects in the database.
4. Develop a clearly defined business strategy for the Madaster Platform, the Material Passport and data services.
