CHBA participated in an NRC-hosted Workshop on "Material Passports and Digital Twins" as part of NRC's Low Carbon Research Platform. The subject relates to 'Circular Economy', which is defined as 'the continual use of resources, designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use and to regenerate natural systems.'

The participants of the workshop (about 60 attendees in person and another 40 online) saw presentations from NRC, industry and national and international academia on the concept of Material Passports in combination with Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Digital Twinning. 

The focus of the workshop was however on 'Material Passports', which are a digital record providing information about the materials, products and components in a structure that is maintained through the life cycle, allowing design and maintenance decisions as well as facilitating re-certification of the material after disassembly or demolition of the building.

One conclusion of the workshop was that data protocols for storing and sharing information are not ready for implementation and that field trials have shown that the cost of demolishing or disassembling buildings to 'harvest' materials for re-use and saving the associated embodied greenhouse gas emissions of producing new building materials can be up to 10 times higher than purchasing new materials. 

There are also huge differences of the readiness of the two major construction industry sectors to participate in full digitization of material management and maintenance with Material Passports, BIM and Digital Twinning. While the large, complex building sector is a lot further in the everyday use of digital tools to aid the design and construction process, the current profile of the low-rise, residential industry sector does not provide a lot of capacity to explore these digital tools, except for a few, larger builders.