How do we meet sustainability targets and reduce the built environment’s environmental impact? RLB’s Head of Sustainability UK & Europe, Heather Evans, talks to BIM Today about the adoption of material passports and how it can transform the way we manage materials to help reduce waste and improve material reuse.
What are Material Passports?
A material passport is a comprehensive digital record that contains information about materials, products, and components used in buildings. Much like a travel passport tracks a person’s journey, a material passport records the lifecycle of materials, from their procurement and use to their potential for reuse or recycling.
These online platforms store recovered building materials for reuse, overall promoting the circular economy by facilitating material exchanges and reducing the need for new raw materials.
Benefits of Material Passports
- Data Transparency and Access: Material passports will consolidate scattered data, providing easy access to essential information about materials throughout a building’s lifecycle. This includes data such as embodied carbon, certifications, and reuse potential.
- Facilitating Material Reuse: In demolition and retrofitting projects, one of the primary challenges is identifying materials that can be reused. Material passports address this by maintaining up-to-date records of all materials used in a building, supporting material recovery efforts and ensuring that valuable resources are reused rather than discarded.
- Preserving Material Value: Documenting the quality, certifications, and reuse potential of materials in a material passport helps preserve their value after the building’s life cycle ends. This ensures that reclaimed materials retain or even increase in value, making them more appealing to contractors and designers who aim to lower the embodied carbon in new construction projects.
- Reducing Waste and Environmental Impact: Material passports help reduce waste by enabling better planning for material recovery during demolition or redevelopment.
- Encouraging Sustainable Manufacturing: As material passports become industry best practice, manufacturers will be incentivised to produce materials that align with circular economy principles. Materials designed with longer lifecycles, greater durability, and recyclability will be favoured, creating a systemic shift in manufacturing toward sustainability.
Challenges and Considerations
Despite their potential, material passports face challenges that prevent widespread adoption. A lack of standardisation in the creation and management of material passports has led to inconsistency in the data collected. Ownership of the data and access rights remain unresolved as well as collaboration between different platforms. To overcome these barriers, collaboration among developers, contractors, manufacturers, and technology providers is essential.
Material passports are a powerful tool in the construction industry’s push toward sustainability. By enabling data transparency, facilitating material reuse, preserving material value, and reducing waste, they help to advance the circular economy in construction. However, to fully unlock the potential of material passports and digital product passports, the industry must work together to establish standardised frameworks, improve data integration, and overcome challenges in passport ownership.
This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in PBC Today
How RLB can help?
We can effectively implement and manage material passports in construction projects by providing strategic guidance, data management, lifecycle analysis and cost estimation. We help clients reduce waste, maximise material value, achieve sustainability goals and facilitate the integration of material passports with digital platforms like BIM, ensuring compliance with sustainability frameworks and environmental certifications. We can also offer training and workshops to build stakeholder understanding and foster collaboration across the supply chain, driving systemic change towards a circular economy
Please contact Heather Evans, RLB UK & Europe Head of Sustainability or Emma Hooper, RLB Digital’s Head of Information Management Strategy for more information or to discuss material passports in more detail.
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