Improving the recycling potential of buildings through Material Passports (MP): An Austrian case study

A major fraction of building materials is transformed into waste at the end of a building's life cycle. For sustainability reasons, it is of importance to maintain or recycle urban stocks, and in consequence to minimise the use of primary resources, wherefore a Material Passport (MP) represents an important support-tool. AMP acts as a design optimisation tool, as well as an inventory of all materials embedded in a building and displays the recycling potential and environmental impact of buildings. In this paper, the proof of concept for a MP is demonstrated on a use case, which is a residential building, whereby a variant in timber and a variant in concrete construction are evaluated. Results show that the recycling potential of the concrete variant is better; however, concrete leads to more waste, due to its significantly higher mass in comparison with timber. The comparison of the environmental impact of the variants shows, that the variant in timber has a significantly lower impact to the environment, than the variant in concrete. Results also show that the MP-methodology has large potentials for improving the recyclability of new buildings as well as for making assumptions for upcoming materials through displaying embedded materials of existing buildings. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.