International Industrial Ecology Day 2021

The built environment plays a vital role in society because of its economic, environmental, cultural connotation. Nevertheless, it is one of the most natural resource consumers and one of the largest waste producers. For this reason, the built stock and flows play a significant role in the fight against resource depletion and climate change. The lack of detailed knowledge on the building flows constitutive materials, components nature, and quantity characteristics is the main reason for the difficulty applicability of circular economy in the building sector. However, building flows embody a valuable mine of secondary raw materials. For sustainability and resilient questions, it is crucial to have a detailed knowledge of the quantity, quality, origin, and destination of the building flows' materials and components to analyze territorial metabolisms better and anticipate the material flows.

This paper presents a component-based bottom-up approach to characterize the building flows' material composition. Data mining, analytics technics, and GIS tools were used to characterize the materials and macro-components of a representative sample of buildings for the Seine-et-Marne France department. The developed model could help to realize detailed and multi-scale building stock and flows material characterization. It could help scientists, urban planners, and stakeholders develop pathways towards a circular economy in the construction sector to implement strategies for better managing secondary materials' recovery and reintegrating into the economic circuits, preserving a maximum of their added value.