Datadriven demolition and recycling

Matching supply and demand of material flows

To reduce the impact of construction, we should try to close the material chain as much as possible through reuse and recycling. 

With this project, Tracimat, as a demolition management organisation, wants to contribute to this. After all, there is a growing demand from material producers for specific materials released during demolition that can serve as raw materials for new products. Moreover, there are still too many recoverable materials at demolition that are not yet, or not sufficiently, recycled at high quality. 

We see that there is a lot of interesting data on material flows in demolition, but that it is not yet optimally used. We want to show that good cooperation, information gathering and sharing within the chain can lead to more reuse and more (high-quality) recycling. And this is where demolition management organisations can play a key role. 

We focus on four material streams: aluminium, roof tiles, flat glass and PVC - and that in cooperation with Reynaers, Wienerberger, Foamglas and Deceuninck. They are looking at how to use the available data and what is still missing to achieve a higher percentage of reuse and recycling. Together, we want to find solutions to a number of existing bottlenecks.

What will the future bring? 

Improving the quality of the Tracimat database is an ongoing challenge that we will continue to work on in the coming years. 

By refining our materials list, used daily by demolition experts, the project's output was already anchored in our operational functioning. Now it is important that the list remains up-to-date and that we can also embed new outlets in our operation in the future, beyond project operation. 

Furthermore, it would be interesting to collect all information on urban mining in a central place. For instance, a research project, VISUM, was recently started with the aim of investigating the recycling-technical preconditions for material cycles of non-stony construction waste streams and formulating policy recommendations. 

In addition, UHasselt and OVAM will conduct additional research into a number of legal preconditions for sharing data from the Tracimat database with third parties.