The project

Why
Reincarnate?

With Reincarnate, we aim to revolutionise the construction industry by developing the technical and social means to establish a reincarnation practice within the building sector.

These means
will allow to:

Maximize the cumulative virtues of a building, a building product, or a building material during its life.

Establish a transparent track record of these virtues.

Use this track record to ensure that a building, building product, or building material can be reused at a high quality in an afterlife.

Challenges facing
construction

Construction and demolition waste (CDW) is the largest waste stream in the EU

Current CDW accounts for approximately 25-30% of all waste, which consists of numerous materials that often cannot be separated meaningfully.

The embodied energy and embodied eq. CO2 emissions in the CDW are significant (8.5 MT eq. CO2 for construction in Sweden in 2015).

The average lifespan of a building is limited

The average lifespan of buildings is only 39.1 years. According to 3L, one of our team members, it is even shorter in the EU (in Germany, an estimated 25-30 years).

The main reason for demolishing buildings is that they are functionally obsolete.

The percentage use of secondary materials is low

It is not possible to reuse entire buildings, building products, or building materials of high product quality within a different setting or for a different purpose.

The building sector hardly uses any secondary materials.

Our
approach

As the core to support the envisioned innovations, we are developing an information system that allows evaluating a building’s circular potential — the Reincarnate Circular Potential Information Model (CP-IM).

The CP-IM will allow to store and capture all required data to understand the potential to extend the lifetime of a building, its building components, and materials, and to find optimal reuse possibilities for each of its elements. It will also enable to trace construction products and materials across different buildings, waste management steps, and construction sites.

Reincarnate will also have a special focus on developing the required social innovations that will allow for a widespread application of the circular concepts the initiative fosters. The social innovations that will be developed will be at the intersection of social-behavioural and economic solutions.

Our final goal is to provide the basic technology and insights that will allow construction actors across Europe to regionally apply the Reincarnate innovations for significantly reducing construction waste.

InnovationsDemonstrators