Data-driven demolition and recycling

Tracimat aims to match supply and demand of material flows

To minimize the impact of construction, we must try to close the material chain as completely as possible through reuse and recycling. With the project 'Data-driven demolition and recycling' Tracimat wants to contribute to this. After all, there is a growing demand from material producers for specific materials that are released during demolition, because these more pure material flows can serve as (primary) raw materials for new products. Moreover, there are still many opportunities for recoverable materials in the demolition process, for which the cycle is currently not (sufficiently) closed or for which a higher-quality recycling can be applied.

Tracimat starts from the premise that there is a lot of interesting information about material flows in demolition work, but that this information is not yet (properly) used. The demolition management organization plays a key role in the whole story. In order to match supply and demand, it has to be able to offer the data from demolition inventories in the right way, at the right time and on the right scale to material producers or users of recovery flows.

Within this research project, Tracimat's ultimate goal is to build a proof of concept that demonstrates how collaboration, information gathering and sharing, and coordination within the chain can lead to more reuse and more (high-quality) recycling.
Very concretely, Tracimat wants to set up practical projects around four material flows: aluminium, roof tiles, flat glass and PVC - and this in collaboration with Reynaers, Wienerberger, Foamglas and Deceuninck. They are looking at how they can use the available information and what information is missing or needs to be provided in more detail to achieve an even higher percentage of reuse and recycling. In this way, they hope to find solutions together for a number of bottlenecks that currently prevent the reuse and recycling of the four materials.