Basically, it's like ready meals: The ingredients are listed on the package. You want to know what's in it. For your own health, for the health of our planet. Applied to living and construction, EPEA has developed so-called building material passes, the Circularity Passports® - buildings, Circularity Passports® for short, CP for short.

The idea comes from the EU research project BAMB (Buildings As Material Banks). From 2015 to 2018, 16 European companies, research institutes and universities prepared a material passport for new buildings and conversions and tested it in practice. This is because up to this time, after the end of the life cycle of buildings, the valuable materials were recycled in third class or ended up in landfill. Now you're a bit further along.

EPEA has already created and continuously developed over 100 material passes. For all types of buildings. Circularity passports are recorded in an internal database together with life cycle assessments and are used for documentation and optimization 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 rated as high if the materials come from renewable or recycled sources. In addition, the material passport assesses CO₂-Footprint, environmental balance and other categories such as material types and quantities, pollutant content, recyclability, separability of materials and disassembly of components.

The benefits of Circularity Passports® - buildings at a glance:

• Evaluates the circulatory capacity of a building and its impact on human well-being.
• Guarantees a high level of transparency when evaluating materials based on clear indicators and understandable scoring.
• Represents an extensive database for detailed and up-to-date information.
• EPEA expert teams can start the project at any time, with the most effective lever for C2C design being early concept development.
• Offers a high level of safety 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.
• If required, serves as a verification tool for the DGNB certification system or the EU taxonomy.

Material certificates are not yet mandatory. A European law could change that. The relevant materials would then have to be carefully selected from the point of view of resource conservation and recyclability as early as building planning. And by using measurable parameters, planning teams have the opportunity to optimize their buildings in terms of the circular economy. The consequences: a true circular economy based on the Cradle to Cradle® design concept and an absolution of the construction sector as the number one waste producer in industrialized countries.

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by Matthias Heinrich