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Madaster circular economy database recruits the largest ever manufacturer of prefabricated elements.
The construction sectors future is inextricably bound to the circular economy, and with no established methodology in Australia for identifying a buildings carbon debt, or any facility to register what prefabricated elements or materials used in a building for that matter, a European initiative called Madaster may well be a harbinger of what can be achieved without too much red tape.
Madaster is an online registry based in the Netherlands where materials and prefabricated elements used in the construction of buildings are registered.
The objective in cataloguing all building materials and prefabricated elements used in the construction process is to make their reuse easier in alignment with circular economy principles. It encourages smart design, eliminates waste; in effect, it’s a database that can be established now and positions a building (and its owner) for the future, and makes it easier to calculate investments.
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The Madaster database allows the user to access information for each component or prefabricated element in a building, such as the separability, the bound CO2 or the recycling potential. Making it possible to determine which products and materials can be reused; thereby reducing the amount of waste and CO2 emissions through circular construction.
A German premium bathroom manufacturer called ALDEWEI is one of the 17 founding members of the German chapter of the Madaster database, and they’ve just joined the database with over 42,000 products. This makes the German manufacturer the provider of the largest amount of data in the global register for materials and products to date.
“High transparency paves the way for new planning and construction methods”, says Roberto Martinez, CSO at KALDEWEI. “In this way, every building becomes a material or raw material database,” he explains, making it clear that the construction industry can also take a big step closer to the vision of “a world without waste”.
KALDEWEI uses an automated upload from its own product information management (PIM) to ensure that all the data is of high quality and up to date. All product information in the Madaster database is available in German, English, French and Dutch.
