The Circularity Passports® Building records which building products and materials are or have been used, how large their ecological footprint is, what their recyclability is and what the value of the materials used are.
Basically, it’s like ready meals: the ingredients are indicated on the package. You want to know what’s inside. For your own health, for the health of our planet. Transferred to housing and construction, EPEA has developed so-called building material passports, the Circularity Passports® Building, or Circularity Passports® for short, or CP for short.
The idea originates from the EU research project BAMB (Buildings As Material Banks). From 2015 to 2018, 16 European companies, research institutes and universities developed a material passport for new buildings and conversions and tested it in practice. Until then, valuable materials were recycled in the third class at the end of the life cycle of buildings or ended up in landfills. In the meantime, they are a little further along.
EPEA has already created over 100 material passports and has continuously developed them. For all types of buildings. Circularity passports are recorded together with life cycle assessments in an internal database and are used for documentation and optimisation during planning. With the help of the Madaster platform, the models available on the market can be harmonized and the residual financial value of raw materials can be determined.
For example, a building is classified as tall if the materials come from renewable or recycled sources, for example. In addition, the material passport assesses the CO2 footprint, the environmental balance and other categories such as material types and quantities, pollutant content, recyclability, separability of materials and dismantling of components.
The advantages of the Building Circularity Passport at a glance:
- Assesses the circularity of a building and its impact on human well-being.
- Guarantees a high level of transparency in the evaluation of materials based on clear indicators and comprehensible scoring.
- Provides an extensive database for detailed and up-to-date information.
- Project entry by EPEA expert teams is possible at any time, whereby the most effective lever for C2C design lies in early concept development.
- Provides a high level of security for circular construction throughout the entire planning process.
- In combination with product documentation (e.g. via the conpli platform), all relevant information can be combined with the materials.
- Serves as a verification tool for the DGNB certification system or the EU taxonomy if required.
Material certificates are not yet mandatory. A European law could change this. The relevant materials would then have to be carefully selected at the building planning stage in terms of resource conservation and recyclability. And by using measurable parameters, planning teams would have the opportunity to optimize their buildings with regard to the circular economy. The consequences: a genuine circular economy based on the Cradle to Cradle® design concept and an absolution of the construction industry as the number one producer of waste in industrialized countries.
