Material Passports: Preparing Public Projects for Reuse

What a material passport actually is

A material passport is a structured digital record of the materials, products and components embedded in a building, infrastructure asset or, at a larger scale, a whole territory. It does not simply list "concrete" or "steel"; it documents where each element sits, how much of it exists, its dimensions and condition, its hazardous or regulated substances, and how easily it could be removed and reused at the end of the asset's life. In the design phase a passport acts as an optimisation tool; in the deconstruction phase it becomes the working inventory that lets a demolition contractor salvage value instead of shredding it.

Passports exist at several levels that are often confused. A product-level passport (a digital product passport) describes a manufactured product type, such as a specific window or insulation board. A building passport or building logbook describes one whole building and is what most public owners first encounter. Finally, the territory-level view aggregates many assets into a "material bank" — a map of reusable resources across an estate or city. For a municipality preparing a district for renewal, the useful unit is usually the building or plot passport, because that is the level at which demolition, renovation and tendering decisions are actually made.

Why public owners should treat buildings as material banks

Construction and demolition waste accounts for more than a third of all waste generated in the European Union, yet the share of this waste that is actually recycled or recovered ranges from under 10 percent to more than 90 percent depending on the member state, largely because countries define and count it differently. That spread is not mainly a technical problem; it is an information and market problem. Public owners who do not know what their buildings contain cannot demand that the contents be reused, and contractors who are not told to salvage will not do so voluntarily.

There is a direct financial argument for treating municipal buildings as material banks. Salvaged components such as doors, glazing, steel members, brick and equipment can be sold or re-used internally, offsetting disposal costs, while recycled aggregates and brick material can replace purchased fill and sub-base. Because buildings that operate efficiently already carry large embodied-carbon loads in their materials, reusing what is already there also reduces the carbon footprint of a new project without any change in its operational energy use.

The regulatory turn: from voluntary passports to digital product passports

The regulatory landscape is moving from good practice toward obligation. The revised Construction Products Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 entered into force on 7 January 2025 and becomes applicable on 8 January 2026, repealing the earlier CPR 2011. Among other changes, it extends its scope to used and 3D-printed products and establishes a digital product passport system for construction products, similar to the mechanism created by the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). This is not yet a blanket requirement to passport every public building; the details will arrive through delegated acts and product-specific rules, and schedules can still change.

Several member states are already ahead of the obligation. According to practitioner guides on digital product passports, the Netherlands, Belgium and France are among the leaders in requiring or encouraging materials passports for new buildings, with a particular emphasis on public buildings. The expected effect is that the product-level data made mandatory under EU rules will become the foundation for building-level and territory-level passports. Public project teams should treat the coming mandatory data as a reason to build their data management now, rather than to wait for a precise deadline.

Step one — a pre-demolition audit written into the contract

A passport is only as good as the audit that feeds it. Standardised guidance for recording building materials before demolition and renovation exists, for example the German pre-demolition audit specification DIN SPEC 91484:2023-09, which defines a procedure to record building products so that the potential for high-quality reuse can be assessed. In practice the audit combines a desk study of drawings, specifications and maintenance records with a site survey that confirms what is actually present, often assisted by drone visual inspection and mass calculations. The audit is typically broken into stages so that its findings can be timed against project planning.

Practical experience from circular-demolition pilot projects is blunt about how audits should be handled. The screening must be required in the tender and the demolition contract, because once a contractor is appointed, they will not carry out the screening voluntarily. The audit should separate hazardous substances from circular resources early, and the soft-stripping phase should happen promptly after the last occupant leaves, before moisture and vandalism destroy salvageable items. Where clean material fractions were specified and monitored, pilot demolition sites reported sorting rates above 99 percent, while mixed-waste volumes stayed minimal.

What the passport must record to feed real reuse

For an inventory to actually move materials toward reuse, the passport should capture more than tonnage. Useful fields include the material composition of each element and its source, quantities and dimensions, a reliable classification so elements can be matched to BIM models or tenders, the presence of substances of concern such as asbestos, lead or regulated coatings, embodied-carbon data drawn from environmental product declarations where available, the expected remaining service life, and the disassembly or access constraints that affect how an item can be recovered. Photographs and geolocation during the audit are cheap additions that dramatically improve the chance of a buyer or a re-use team recognising the component.

The most important decision is what happens to the data after it is collected. A passport that sits in a drawer closes no loop. The inventory should be linked to a reuse marketplace, a public materials bank platform or an internal re-use catalogue, so that quantities and condition can be matched to demand at the moment a building is released. Digital twins and QR-code tags on components can keep the record live across renovation cycles, but the underlying data structure and ownership of the record need to be agreed at the start, including who updates the passport after partial demolition or refurbishment.

• Material composition, sources and proportions of each element.
• Quantities, dimensions and a recognised classification code for BIM linking.
• Substances of concern and hazard status, scheduled for early removal.
• Condition assessment and remaining service life of each component.
• Embodied-carbon or environmental product declaration data where it exists.
• Recovery constraints: fixings, access, glazing, composite layers.
• Owner of the data, storage location and update responsibility.

Honest limits: cost, data gaps and thin markets

The main obstacles are practical rather than conceptual. Selective demolition is often more time-consuming and more expensive than conventional demolition, and the savings appear later, in reduced disposal fees, recovered material sales and avoided purchases; the cost and benefit therefore fall on different budgets unless a project explicitly reallocates them. Data quality is the second barrier. Passports assembled from drawings can overstate what is actually in a building, while field audits of old or poorly documented structures can be expensive, which is why most standards recommend staged audits matched to project milestones.

A passport also cannot create a market on its own. Reuse only closes the loop when there is a buyer, an internal demand or a regulatory incentive, and the quality of secondary materials is judged against the same technical requirements as new products. Hazardous legacy materials such as asbestos retain their full environmental burden regardless of the documentation, and must be handled separately under national waste and occupational-safety rules. Because waste definitions and thresholds differ between countries, treat any passport as a locally tailored planning tool and verify the applicable legislation in your own jurisdiction rather than assuming one European format applies everywhere.