Urban Mining for Circular Urban Renewal: a bottom-up life cycle assessment framework

Resource efficiency is one of the key pillars in the European Green Deal. While the circular economy action plan will guide the transition of all sectors, the resource-intensive construction sector will be a key focus. An important strategy in this context is using the existing stock to mine construction materials. Detailed bottom-up information is required to enhance resource efficiency through urban mining of the existing building stock. It should be clear how many materials are currently in the stock, when these will become available and to what extent these can be reclaimed in an environmentally viable way. The objective of this research proposal is to develop a spatio-temporal building stock model allowing to gain these insights. In contrast to currently applied top-down (black-box) modelling approaches, a bottom-up approach is envisioned that enables identifying the location of the materials, how these are implemented in the buildings and when these will become available. The innovation of the research lies in the high granularity of the model with rich-data spatialised using a Geographical Information System. This model will quantify the amount of materials that will become available, identify their location and estimate their time of occurrence. The model will assess how these material flows can be reclaimed in an environmentally viable way, quantifying embodied environmental flows as compared to a business-as-usual approach. The model will be used to assess various renovation cases in the cities of Leuven and Brussels to demonstrate and test the approach on actual data.