On 1 July, Jakob Napiontek presented the latest developments of EUBUCCO, a comprehensive expansion of the existing building database, as part of the CircEUlar project, at the 12th International Conference on Industrial Ecology in Singapore, delivering the presentation ‘Building-level material stock estimates and outlook for Europe’.
The built environment is responsible for around half of the global extraction of raw materials. Material reuse and recycling are important measures to increase circularity in the building sector and reduce raw material use. However, we first need to understand which materials are currently used in the built environment, and where.
To address this knowledge gap, the Cities Group at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is developing EUBUCCO version 1.0. This updated database covers over 300 million buildings across all the EU countries, plus Switzerland, the UK, and Norway. Where building attributes such as height and use-type are missing from cadastral records or OpenStreetMap, machine learning methods are used to fill these data gaps. This will enable to create the first comprehensive building inventory at this scale.
The EUBUCCO v1.0 database’s key innovation is a new material layer that maps the structural type of each building and connects this information to material intensity databases. This approach enables the calculation of material composition for Europe’s building stock at unprecedented spatial resolution. The resulting dataset reveals significant spatial variations in per-capita material use across different urbanization levels and population densities throughout Europe.
When coupling this information with regional population projections, the material data supports dynamic stock modeling to assess future localized material demand and identify urban mining potentials. These analyses can inform circular economy strategies and material recovery planning from local to European scales, providing quantitative foundations for policy decisions on building stock management and resource flows.
EUBUCCO v1.0 with the material layer will be publicly accessible upon completion of the CircEUlar project.
