The Building Passports initiative: facilitating circular economy, low-carbon emissions and healthy urban development

The Building Passports initiative is a short-term project aiming to develop the concept, knowledge and data platform for “building passports”. These passports will gather data such as location, typology, materials,... [ view full abstract ]

The Building Passports initiative is a short-term project aiming to develop the concept, knowledge and data platform for “building passports”. These passports will gather data such as location, typology, materials, components and lifetime of buildings for an urban case study: the city of Odense, in Denmark. These building passports are expected to facilitate the implementation of circular economy thinking in the building industry, to assist in benchmarking and reducing carbon emissions and support healthy urban developments. This initiative is running from January 2018 until December 2019 and is expected to support a sustainable and competitive Danish building industry.

This initiative will establish an exchangeable knowledge and data platform for supporting circular building design and the recycling of building materials. This platform will provide support to:

1) Waste handling companies for urban mining strategies as a resource cadaster;

2) Architect and construction companies for circular building design and materials selection;

3) Urban sustainability related data providers and users (e.g., construction management, smart city initiative, and big data) in data generation, integration, and harmonization;

4) Authorities and legislators on the refurbishment and maintenance policy;

5) Urban planners for understanding the sustainability of urban development including trade-off between direct and indirect environmental impacts.

This initiative will address how to harmonize and reconcile buildings related raw data from different sources for informing circular buildings, urban planning, and urban mining with five work packages: 1) Conceptual database development; 2) Prototype testing; 3) Data collection and refining; 4) Example of use; 5) Results dissemination and stakeholder engagement. 

This presentation will review related ongoing projects, describe the objectives of the Building Passports initiative and its expected implementation and outcome.