Building Circularity V2: Material Content

For each material you can assign a percentage content of reused, recycled, and renewable content in the material by mass. Some products have a default value for the recycled, renewable, or reused percentage, which can come directly from the product or a default based on the type of product. 

This information does not influence the LCA results but is used to document material circularity.

The Building Circularity V2 tool calculates the circularity of the material content according to ISO 59020 2024. According to this standard, the percentage of reused, recycled, virgin renewable, and virgin non-renewable are mutually exclusive and should equal 100% of the material by mass.

This does not require affect the workflow of the tool. The Renewable content input still uses default values from the product or the type of product, whilst being editable. The value entered in this input should reflect the renewable content in a physical sense, and the tool will calculate the individual material contents after depending on what values you have for reused and recycled content.

For example, a material could be 90% renewable at the point of production and 50% has been reused from a previous project. The inputs below reflect this.

The tool will now calculate the mutually exclusive content for reused, virgin renewable, and virgin non-renewable.

DGNB Building Resource Passport

For DGNB users, two additional classifications of material content are provided to support the production of the Building Resource Passport (Gebäuderessourcenpass).

For each resource you can assign a percentage content of reused, repurposed, recycled, downcycled, and renewable content.

These are defined according to DIN as:

Classification	Definition
Reused	Reusing a product or material in the same function it was created for.
Repurposed	Reusing a product or material in a new function which it wasn't originally created for.
Recycled	Processing of a product or material in a closed-loop system, retaining it's original quality.
Downcycled	Processing of a product or material with a loss of original quality.

Any percentage of material mass assigned to repurposed or downcycled will be reported as such in the Word export of the Building Resource Passport. However, as these classifications do not align with ISO standards, the mass will be considered as recycled under Material Recovered in the circularity index.