Each building is made of materials that have been chosen, paid for, and installed for a specific purpose, whether for aesthetics, practicality, or a mix of both. However, when a building is torn down, its materials are often crushed or discarded due to concerns about their origin and robustness. Material passports are emerging as a way to counter this waste by giving each component a digital record that travels with it through its lifetime.
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This article explains how material passports work, their importance in the construction industry, and how they could help to make building components reusable.
Why Buildings Rarely Get a Second Life
Construction is one of the most resource-hungry activities on the planet. The built environment consumes over 40% of the raw materials extracted from the Earth and generates about one-third of
global waste.1
It is also responsible for nearly 40% of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. These figures make the fate of old building materials a central question for climate policy, resource security, and the future of urban development.1
Moreover, McKinsey estimates that only about 1% of demolition materials are reused. Factories still produce concrete and steel for new projects, and only about 1% of these materials are directly reused.3
In the United Kingdom, about 90% of construction waste is recovered, but much of this is downcycling. For example, concrete is often crushed to be used as fill for roads and foundations. This process keeps materials out of landfills, but loses much of their energy and value.2
What a Material Passport Records
The Buildings as Material Banks initiative is a European research project that defines material passports as digital records that describe the characteristics of materials and components. These passports store the value of materials for current use, recovery, and reuse.
In simple terms, a passport gives each material an identity. It keeps track of where a product came from, what it contains, how it performs, and who has handled it over time.1,4,5
The information in a passport can be quite detailed. It may include the chemical composition, structural performance, environmental impact, connection types, current condition, and location within the building. It can also store construction drawings, 3D models, and instructions for assembly and disassembly.
This information is very important decades later when a contractor needs to decide if a steel beam or timber panel can be safely removed and reused.4
Researchers link passports to building information modeling (BIM), which are digital 3D models used by architects and engineers for project planning. A recent MDPI Sustainability report identified BIM as one of the most-discussed technologies in passport research, alongside blockchain technology for secure record-keeping. Linking the two allows a building model to act as a live inventory, showing which materials sit where and how they might be recovered.6
Material Passports in Practice
The idea behind these passports is to treat buildings as material banks, where components are deposited for a period of use and later withdrawn for another project.
In 2022, researchers at ETH Zurich tested this idea with a small wooden geodesic dome built from reused and recovered materials. Each element carried an engraved quick-response (QR) code that linked to an online passport with information about its properties and history.4
The team built the dome, took it apart, relocated it, and rebuilt it using the same parts. The QR codes proved cheap and allowed anyone with a phone to check an element's details. However, the trial also exposed weaknesses: the online records stopped being updated after reconstruction because contributors had no immediate reason to keep them up to date.4
Commercial platforms are also applying this approach to entire buildings. Madaster, a digital platform for construction data, generates material passports from project files such as Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) models exported from BIM software or Excel spreadsheets.7
Users decide which details to include, covering materials, circularity, environmental impact, and financial value. Each passport can report a Madaster Circularity Index and carries a QR code linking authorized users to the building's full record online.7
The Obstacles Standing in the Way
Data gaps are the most immediate problem hindering the wider implementation of material passports.
Most buildings standing today were constructed long before anyone thought to record their materials in a structured way. Surveying them with laser scanning or ground-penetrating radar is possible, though these methods still need considerable manual effort. In some cases, the reusable condition of a material can only be confirmed once deconstruction begins and hidden elements come into view.2,6
Standardization is a second hurdle. Commercial platforms and academic teams have each developed their own templates, and these systems rarely share data with one another. There is also no agreed definition of what a passport must include, and terms such as building passport, product passport, and material passport are used inconsistently. Without common formats, a passport created by one firm may be unreadable to the next.2,6
Economic factors and responsibility further complicate the situation. No established business model rewards the effort of creating passports, and the payoff may arrive decades after the original investment.6
Policy and Practice Begin to Align
To address standardization and data gaps, policy and practice are beginning to converge.
In January 2025, the European Union’s revised Construction Products Regulation came into force, establishing the framework for Digital Product Passports in construction. These passports hold declarations of performance, safety information, and instructions for use. The European Commission states that it will also allow the reliable calculation of a whole building's carbon footprint, giving designers and regulators a clearer view of emissions.8
On the practical side, product passports track items from the factory, while material passports follow them throughout the building's lifecycle. Researchers recommend pairing passports with pre-demolition audits, deconstruction plans, and interoperable databases. They also encourage clients to reuse entire buildings whenever possible, as preserving a structure retains the most embodied carbon and reduces demolition waste.2
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Conclusion
Material passports give building components a lasting digital identity that records what they are, how they work, and how to remove them. This information addresses a core challenge in recycling demolition materials: namely, a lack of knowledge about their quality. While field trials have demonstrated the effectiveness of this concept on a smaller scale, various gaps in data, standards, business models, and ownership still limit wider adoption across the industry.4,6
Whether passports can make buildings reusable depends on the systems built around them. In Europe, Digital Product Passports provide a good starting point, and audits, shared data standards, and clear responsibilities for record updates can build on them. If those pieces come together, the buildings built today could become reliable sources of materials for future projects.2,8
References and Further Reading
- Costa, A. R. (2025). Materials passports facilitate circularity in the construction industry. Nature Reviews Materials, 10(10), 720-721. DOI:10.1038/s41578-025-00842-x. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/233345/1/20250818_NATREVMATS-25-0464_Costa.pdf
- Costa, A. R. et al. (2025). Eight recommendations to adopt materials passports and accelerate material reuse in construction: Insights from academia and practice. Npj Materials Sustainability, 3(1), 33. DOI:10.1038/s44296-025-00079-3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44296-025-00079-3
- How circularity can make the built environment more sustainable. (2025). [Online] McKinsey. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights/how-circularity-can-make-the-built-environment-more-sustainable.
- Byers, B. S., & de Wolf, C. (2023). QR Code-Based Material Passports for Component Reuse Across Life Cycle Stages in Small-Scale Construction. Journal of Circular Economy, 1(2). DOI:10.55845/IWEB6031. https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/113
- Materials passports. BAMB. https://www.bamb2020.eu/topics/materials-passports/
- El Ammari, H., & Guerriero, A. (2026). The Material Passport for a Circular Construction Industry: A PRISMA Based Systematic Review. Sustainability, 18(6), 2858. DOI:10.3390/su18062858. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/18/6/2858
- Material passports. (2024). [Online] Madaster. Available at: https://docs.madaster.com/us/en/knowledge-base/material-passports
- New EU rules on the safety and sustainability of construction products mark a new step for the sector’s competitiveness. (2025). [Online] European Commission. Available at: https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules-safety-and-sustainability-construction-products-mark-new-step-sectors-competitiveness-2025-01-07_en
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