ENVIRONMENT REGISTER LAUNCH APPROACHING
Author: Joran Straatman, , Advisor Circular Economy, Cirkelstad partner at KplusV
THE ENVIRONMENT REGISTER IN BRIEF
In the first quarter of 2020, Cirkelstad and Madaster started the development of the Environment Register — a platform that makes a positive contribution to our society and facilitates the transition towards a circular economy by providing access to information about objects within our physical environment. This information concerns, for example:
- Location (address, GPS code);
- Type of structure (e.g. building, bridge or playground equipment);
- Life cycle / year of construction;
- Measurement unit (e.g. square meterage, number, kg);
- Amounts.
STATE OF DEVELOPMENT
The official launch of the 1.0 version is approaching. During the completion of this first technical version, Madaster’s IT team worked on the structural development, which, in the coming weeks, will be followed by the visual representation of the platform. In the spring of 2021, the basis on which parties are able to easily connect via an API will be completed.
Parallel to this process, Cirkelstad has started to explore which organisations could connect, with talks currently being held with both public and private parties. The first connections are expected to be finalised upon completion of the 1.0 version, at the end of February. This means that, after careful coordination, these parties will make data available on, for example, bridges, banks, lamp posts and parking meters. The level of detail of this information depends on what these parties have made available on regional and local levels.
THE NEXT PHASE
The first stakeholders have taken steps to make data available in the Environment Register. We will be using the coming period to scale up these efforts and link to more data registers. Therefore, we are talking with national umbrella organisations for municipalities, housing corporations and construction companies. After all, these organisations have a wide reach.
In addition, we are also looking for possibilities from a different perspective, to develop a register that is as complete as possible. The providers of objects have a role to play, here, which is why we have contacted organisations that do so for government authorities. They have detailed information in the form of product specifications. This information can provide a higher level of detail for the Environment Register, resulting in increased data richness. Ultimately, this will contribute to a higher circular value of these buildings.
CONTRIBUTE BY LINKING WITH THE ENVIRONMENT REGISTER
If you are a government organisation within the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area or a general building contractor and your organisation has data sources that, fully or partially, outline the above-mentioned properties of objects within the physical environment of a certain area in the Netherlands, then we would like to hear from you. Together, we could explore an easy way of linking our databases. To do so, please contact Joran Straatman, Cirkelstad partner at KplusV, via +31 (0) 629489508 or j.straatman@kplusv.nl.
