International Industrial Ecology Day 2021

Improving our comprehension of the weight and spatial distribution of urban built environment is essential for informing urban waste and environmental management, but this is often hampered by inaccuracy and inconsistency of the typology and material composition data of buildings and infrastructure in bottom-up method. Here, we have integrated big data mining and analytics techniques and compiled a local material composition database to address these gaps, for a detailed characterization of the quantity and spatial distribution (in 500 m × 500 m grids) of the urban built environment stocks in Beijing and the subway material stocks across 37 cities in China. We found that 3621 megatons (140 ton/cap) of construction materials were accumulated in Beijing’s buildings and infrastructure, and 1,006 megatons materials in Chinese subway system. Our results demonstrate that harnessing emerging big data and analytics could help realize more spatially refined characterization of built environment stocks for benchmarking future resource demand, informing sustainable subway planning, prospecting urban mining and waste management opportunities and challenges, and mitigating the associated environmental impacts for global GHG emission reduction.