MADASTER AND EDGE TECHNOLOGIES PROMOTE CIRCULAR CONSTRUCTION USING MATERIAL PASSPORTS

Amsterdam – 9 April 2019 – From today, EDGE Technologies has joined forces with Madaster as a partner and enterprise licensee. In doing so, EDGE has committed itself to ensuring all future Dutch developments are included in the Madaster online materials library, and to generating material passports for its clients. A material passport contains a wealth of information on the quality, origin and location of materials and provides insight into the circularity score of a given building. Documenting, registering and archiving the materials used in a building simplifies the sustainable use – and reuse – of materials.

Madaster acts as a public, online library of materials used in the built environment. Materials and structures will now be documented, just like the parcelling and ownership of land in the land registry. It will then be possible to generate a secure, web-based material passport for any piece of real property from the Madaster database. This material passport will contain information on the quality and origin of materials, as well as the extractability of products and their current location. The Madaster Circularity Indicator (CI) provides insight into the degree of circularity at both the building and product level, as well as an incentive for owners, financial backers, designers, suppliers, contractors and processors to adopt circular construction principles.

In the past year, EDGE Technologies has successfully blazed new trails with the Madaster platform and has achieved comprehensive Madaster registration of the EDGE Olympic building as well. This building is the highest scoring EDGE building to date. Numerous circular components that contributed to this score have been rendered visible by EDGE in the 3-D environment of EDGE Olympic. The result is clear insight into circularity, as all materials that can be reused in the future have been identified. This success has prompted EDGE to register all its new and yet-to-be-developed buildings in Madaster and to ensure they are equipped with a material passport.

“Our planet is a closed system, which is why we must facilitate permanent reuse of the ‘limited editions’ – such as materials – so that they remain available forever. The current situation shows us that, when stripped of their identities, materials become waste and are then no longer available. It’s possible to eliminate 100% of waste by assigning a documented identity to materials using material passports. After all, anything that has a documented identity can be traced, meaning it will remain available indefinitely. By assigning a financial worth to documented materials and monitoring their movements, the act of identification itself will generate monetary value in the short and long term as well.” – Thomas Rau, Board member with the Madaster Foundation

Constantijn Berning, Development Director at EDGE Technologies, says:
“We have been staunch supporters of this initiative from day one. A cleaner environment starts at home, so to speak, which is why we sincerely hope that our action will set a good example for the sector as a whole. Madaster provides us with an additional dimension of data that will enable us, in turn, to make great strides in the right direction.”