Endless chains of materials, buildings that are repeatedly taken apart and reassembled. There is hardly any waste left. Is that the future of building? At least it is Thomas Rau’s vision. “It can become a reality faster than I originally believed myself,” says the architect. The German, who lives in the Netherlands, founded Madaster four years ago. An online database that is supposed to provide similarly relevant information for building construction as land registers do for real estate.
While land is about location, size and owner, Madaster is supposed to save how many tons of steel and what wood are used in buildings. Where the material comes from, what it’s worth and how well it can be recycled. Clean bookkeeping as a prerequisite for sustainable building. The goal: circular economy, or, as the 61-year-old puts it: “System change, away from linear thinking.”
Experts such as Lamia Messari-Becker, professor for building technology and building physics at the University of Siegen, have been demanding for some time that raw materials in buildings be better documented. Just as many residential buildings have an energy certificate today, it makes sense to have a resource pass that shows what is in the building and what emissions are caused by it. “The most important thing is to make things visible and to raise awareness,” says Messari-Becker. The Madaster initiator Rau sees the same thing. “We don’t say it’s a good or bad material. The customer has to decide for himself.”
An offshoot is also about to start in Germany
So far, around ten million square meters have been registered on Madaster, especially in the Netherlands, says the architect. So a few thousand buildings, but not bad to start with. The project has fans such as the Dutch developer BDP, who announced in 2020 that they would register a thousand new apartments on the platform.
Rau is now expanding the model internationally: by the end of the year there should be seven national companies, for example in Norway, Switzerland and Belgium. Commissioned and monitored by a non-profit foundation, on whose supervisory board there are experts such as Marzia Traverso, who heads the Institute for Sustainability in Construction at RWTH Aachen University. The European Union supported the development of the database with around 2.5 million euros from the Horizon research program.
An offshoot is also about to start in Germany. Managing director Patrick Bergmann, who previously worked in real estate valuation at the management consultancy Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), wants to bring at least 10,000 buildings onto the platform within three years: “The database must be broad.” Only then can reliable statements be made not only for individual objects, but also for building types.
This is important because information for new buildings can be fed digitally into the database relatively easily. In the case of old buildings, however, it is often poorly documented what has been built over the years and decades. Material analyzes are time-consuming and not always possible. As an alternative, estimates are used.
The material pass should also indicate how much the raw materials are worth
In practice, it looks like this: Planners or builders register building data on the platform: which material was used and how much of it, and different alloys can also play a role. Product manufacturers complete the information, for example on windows or bathrooms. The platform uses this to generate a material pass, which also indicates how much the raw materials are worth. Only the owner has insight into the building profile, but product and metadata should also be accessible to others.
Madaster isn’t the only company dedicated to the topic. Two years ago, the online component exchange Restado founded the start-up Concular, which offers software for inventory recording and the creation of material passports. Madaster differs not least in its claim to generate and update data for the entire industry.
Bergmann has won over 20 particularly committed supporters to date. They are called “Kennedys”, an allusion to the American President and his lunar program. The supporters sponsor the construction of the German Madaster version each with a five-digit amount and work on its development. The consultancy Drees & Sommer, for example, the construction company Kondor Wessels, the project developer Interboden, but also asset manager Commerz Real and the largest German housing group Vonovia. You see yourself as an avant-garde, as a community of like-minded people. That promises at least an image boost.
Kaldewei, for example, a manufacturer of bathroom products, wants to set all product data on Madaster, “up to the threshold of trade secrets”, as managing director Roberto Martinez promises. This makes it easier to recycle tubs and showers, which at Kaldewei are traditionally made of steel and enamel. “That fits in with our corporate philosophy,” says Martinez.
The CO₂ balance could soon be more important than the question of how much energy a house uses
The most important allies, however, are investors who buy and hold real estate portfolios. “The circular economy issue is becoming more and more important to us. Large investors are increasingly wondering what ecological footprint their portfolio has,” says Sarah Krüger, Sustainability Manager at Commerz Real. “Madaster anticipates developments that the industry can expect from the legislature.”
Krüger is thinking, for example, of EU regulations on sustainability, which could soon focus more on material consumption and climate-damaging emissions over the entire life cycle of real estate. In the future, the German Building Energy Act (GEG) will also be less based on how much energy a building consumes and more on what its overall CO₂ balance looks like, including the production and recycling of building materials.
Even if that is a dream of the future – a material passport can already have some advantages today, such as increasing the selling price of a property because it gives the buyer security. It is also easier to negotiate with the demolition contractor if it is clear what values are in the building. Rau reports on an assembly hall at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, the demolition of which, according to material analysis, brought the owner some proceeds; in the case of a hotel, the dismantling costs could have been reduced by several hundred thousand euros.
But the demolition contractors are also hoping for advantages through transparency: The German Demolition Association considers Madaster to be “helpful for the extraction of recyclable building materials”. Above all, an “advance discharge of pollutants” is of interest to the industry.
There is another benefit for real estate companies. Today, buildings are usually completely depreciated over a period of 25 to 50 years. However, if they are viewed as raw material stores in the future, it can be worthwhile to account for income from the sale of materials and recycling – there would then no longer be a write-down to zero. That would improve the profitability of many companies in one fell swoop.
What may sound like a trick to laypeople is even advisable from the point of view of experts: “If the values are important, they must be taken into account in the context of correct accounting,” says Klaus-Peter Naumann, spokesman for the board of the Institute of Auditors in Düsseldorf. “Counting yourself worse is not an option.” In the shipping industry, for example, containers are not written down to zero due to their high material value, but only written down to the extent of their scrap proceeds. Why shouldn’t that be possible with steel girders and wooden structures?
Buildings that are planned and built according to the circular principle from the outset, with pollutant-free materials and components that are easy to dismantle should benefit most from this. Rau finds this only fair: “Things change the fastest when there is a financial incentive.”