Material Passports: Circular Building Solutions with Andrea Charlson, Managing Director, Madaster UK

The tenants for the building are interested in a passport for their fit-out because they can see the bits that they bring in and their fit-out are actually probably going to have a shorter lifespan than the main shell and core. So actually they'll be able to utilize the data that's in the passport sooner, and so it's almost like a stronger value proposition in that, in that way.

Hello and welcome to Rethink What Matters, the podcast dedicated to aligning the economy and ecology with everyone for improved business performance, stronger families, and a greener, cooler planet. Hello, Andrea.

Hello, Paul.

Well, perhaps if you could tell us a little bit about Modasta and what you're doing there. First, that'd be great.

Yes, of course. MERDASTA is an online platform that vision, ambition, mission in life is to facilitate a circular built environment. So I think we're in the right place on your podcast. What we try to do through the platform is enable the registration, documentation, and exchange of material data relating to buildings and infrastructure assets. What that means is we give materials and products an identity, we give them an identity that they then retain whilst they're in the built asset, so that whenever they're no longer needed, they're much more likely to have a second life, either somewhere else in the asset, somewhere else in the portfolio.

That sounds like a brilliant idea, something we definitely need. So what's the story behind Modasta? How did Modasta get started?

Modasta got started in 2017. It originates from the Netherlands, as many circular innovations do, and it was the idea initially of an architect called Thomas Rau, who is very passionate about circularity already and circular business models, and saw this kind of data problem as something that can be solved. And he met up with two of our other co-founders who were both from the financial services industry. So we had the kind of built environment architect visionary with the environmental passion, and then two people with experience of the financial world, and the bringing of them two together was how Modasta was created originally.

Okay, great. And I believe he wrote a book as well?

He did. Materials Matter. I think the ideas in the book have been formulated over a long time. There's lots of case studies in the book, some from his own practice and some from elsewhere. But the book itself came together just a couple of years ago, and I think only very recently translated into English.

Okay, so what's your own personal interest in this, Andrea, then, in working at Madasta?

Well, I have been working in the sustainable built environment space for almost 15 years. I actually trained as a structural engineer but was passionate from very early on in my career about the sustainability of materials. How much were we using? Where were they coming from? And, and how much were we wasting? And when I heard Modasta was planning on launching in the UK last year, I was really excited to help make that a success in any way I can, could. And it turned out that the way I could help was by being the managing director. So that was quite a nice surprise.

Brilliant, that's fantastic. So who are the customers then? What's the business model for, for Modasta?

So the Modasta platform, we aim to provide value to a range of different customers. Our kind of the ultimate core value proposition is aimed at asset owners, so the people who long-term own these assets. The reason being that the registers of what materials are in the built environment, they are useful and interesting at points of construction, but they become more valuable the further away from that point of construction we are, because we're more likely to have forgotten. So our number one customer proposition are the asset owners. We also have tried to make the process as easy and efficient to use for construction companies and also those involved in the design of built assets, because ultimately it will be those people who will need to collate the information together during any kind of construction project. So, we try— we integrate with BIM processes, so Building Information Modelling, to try and efficiently create the passports, and we've added a lot of kind of extra features to add more value to the data, so we can do things like carbon footprint, We can do circularity assessments and detachability assessments, which can all be monitored throughout design and construction. And then our third customer segment is the manufacturers and producers themselves. So obviously the passports that we create at an asset level is only as good as the passport information we have from a product level. And so we have a proposition where manufacturers can provide their data for free because we think that's what's going to make the best passport. But we also have another proposition where we can offer further support to manufacturers so they can maybe track and trace their products and have that ongoing relationship with the people who eventually own their products, which is another proposition for us.

Okay, can you tell us a little bit more about the passports then and how they work?

Yes, so the passports, we have, we have product-level datasets. These are kind of the equivalent of product-level passports, product material passports. There's a lot of terminology going around that is kind of all around the same thing. There isn't actually a 100% like standardized definition yet, but for our current implementation of product-level material passports, we capture what the product is, where it's come from, who's made it, what its rough kind of material composition is, its circularity attributes, both in terms of its circular history— like, has it already got some recycled content, has it already been reused— and its circular future, so is it able to be recovered for recycling or reuse. We also incorporate all of the embedded environmental impact data, like you would find recorded on an environmental product declaration. And then we also have a dossier, which is where we can store any other piece of information that would be useful to facilitate the continued use of that product in its first life or facilitate its second onward life. So that could be anything from like drawings, warranties, other kind of product certifications, technical specifications, manufacturer take-back schemes. The world is kind of your oyster when it comes to the dossier. Okay, great.

And can you tell us a little bit more about the transparency that you provide them?

Yes. So everything that we do in Modasta is kind of done in layers. So you can create as many layers within your passporting system as you like. You can start from raw material components, you can add them into product components, assemblies, and then ultimately they get assembled into whole assets.

Right.

So that enables a nice transparent flow of information from like the provider of the information, typically from a manufacturer through the design and construction team to the end owner of the assets. That's kind of one level of transparency that we enable. You can then make that information at the asset level available to others as well. So kind of completely within the user's control, they can choose to share copies of the model. For example, if they sell the asset, the whole information could then be sold alongside with the asset. Or if they wanted to give someone permission to view part of it, that's all possible within the system as well.

Right, okay. And have you got some case studies perhaps you could share with us?

Yeah, of course. So in the UK, we actually fairly recently launched in the UK, just in November 2023, but we were able to do a pilot project before that in 2021 where we worked with British Land and the sustainability consultants GXN, and they created a material passport for the One Broadgate development in Central London, in the City of London. This was a big collaboration, obviously, between those two parties, but also the designers and the contractor who was involved at an early stage to collate all the information together, and they have created an as-designed passport for that building at the moment for the shell and core.

Right.

They wanted to do that for sustainability reasons to kind of showcase that they were creating a high-quality sustainable building, and they were actually awarded a BREEAM innovation credit for that because that was the first kind of large-scale use of material passporting in the UK. Right. So, that was the first a pilot project, we are still talking with all the parties involved in that project about the processes for how to transform that into an as-built passport, because it's still undergoing its construction process right now. And we're also now talking to the tenants for that building as well. The tenants for the building are interested in a passport for their fit-out, because they can see the bits that they bring in and the fit-out are actually probably going to have a shorter lifespan than the main Shell Core. So, actually, they'll be able to utilise the data that's in the Passport sooner. And so, it's almost like a stronger value proposition in that way.

That's interesting. Can we explore the fit-out side of it a little bit more?

So, with the fit-out, there's typically usually a fit-out contractor who kind of oversees all the trades, but we are looking at a whole range of different packages from the some of the mechanical and electrical equipment, the floor finishes, other surface finishes, and even furniture and bespoke kind of furniture and joinery. So, all of these aspects kind of come in at the later stages of the project. They are still moderately high carbon, and when you look over a whole lifecycle, because they are replaced much more frequently than the main structural elements, they kind of do add up quite quite a lot. And so we're looking at trying to capture as much of that information as possible so that they can be resold, taken back, repaired, or moved around into different assets.

Who's going to own this data then? If you have an asset and there's a fit-out going on, who's going to make sure that everything's kept up to date after, say, 15 years or 10 years or however long it is? And everything starts to be dismantled and people start throwing things away.

Yeah, keeping material passports up to date I think is going to be a big challenge for the whole industry going forward. After the challenge of creating them, the next challenge will be keeping them up to date. I think one of the things that I'm really trying to work on at the moment, as well as promoting the idea of material passports and ModAstra as a way to achieve them, is the value of having this data for the ultimate asset owner and the property managers in particular. Because if they can get some value from having that data, it being accurate and up to date, then it's much more likely to get embedded into the normal processes. Whereas if it's just, you know, a burden that has to be done for some theoretical value in the future, then it's going to be much harder to convince people to put that work in. So we're trying to incorporate a range of like kind of, KPI reporting on top of the passport information, so it can help with maybe if it's scope 3 carbon emissions or other kind of corporate targets, and really trying to maximize what you get back from the data to make it worthwhile, the effort putting it in.

Right, okay, and are laws and regulations and policies, are they supporting you making this a bit easier?

In some ways, yes, I think in London in particular we've been very lucky, if you want to, you can never use the word lucky in a policy kind of context. In the past few years, there's a new planning policy been enacted, which means very large developments have to consider a circular economy at the earliest stage of planning and produce a statement as part of the planning process. And within that policy objective, it talks about recording what materials are used in the project and setting targets and circularity targets and reuse targets. So that whole policy framework has been very helpful for the idea of passports, even though passports are not necessarily explicitly mentioned within that policy.

Right.

I think on a European scale as well, there is definitely two different types of policies that are kind of coming that are helpful. So there's the, the EU taxonomy, which is all around sustainable investments. It's making it much clearer about what a sustainable investment is and setting specific reporting requirements for that. And they will ultimately have an influence on what we consider a sustainable investment in the UK as well. Right. And then on a kind of completely different angle, the new UK regulations around the Building Safety Act are also another driver for material passports or collating, you know, better information about what materials and products go into our buildings, and passports can be a part of that solution as well.

What about the quantity surveyors? I mean, they sound like they might be very interested. Something like this?

One of the things we hope to do with the platform, and also it is part of the broader kind of material passport philosophy, is around making aggregated data available as well.

Right.

And so how that relates to kind of surveyors is that we can look, you know, across a city and see what kind of materials are where, what kind of materials are in certain building typologies, and that can help with, you know, the surveying for future future projects. It can also help with knowing, like, what materials might be available to be incorporated into your projects. There is potentially a role for quantity surveyors in helping to collate this information in the creation of passports. The way that we've implemented it, and, you know, for efficiency, we're trying to promote the use of BIM. And so the responsibility would typically lie, you know, with whoever the information management role sitting with. So that's often with the architect in the earlier design stages and the contractor during construction. But there's always going to need to be an oversight role of that, the checking to make sure it is of a good enough quality, and that could be one of the ways that quantity surveyors are brought into the market.

The circular economy, it's more of a theoretical exercise than a practical exercise, isn't it? Because You just can't reuse and recycle stuff forever. Eventually it just degrades to a form that it's not really any good for its original purpose.

I mean, I think that's the current economy in, and I would call that the recycling economy and not the circular economy. And for me personally, one of the key differences with where we are now, even like even at the vanguard of where we are now compared to where we could theoretically be in a circular economy is, in my opinion, a circular economy is where you have designed in the ongoing life of use of that product or material. So it's from its very inception, it was always meant to be kept at its highest value and not downgraded. And so you could say, like you said, in theory, but it could in theory infinitely be used without downgrading because it's got the right design and it's got the right kind of systems behind it, the right business models and the right logistics, and eventually the right, you know, regulatory and fiscal landscape as well. Yes.

So what do you think Modasta is making easier for contractors and architects and all those involved in the built environment?

I think Modasta is making a few things easier. I think it's making— well, my hope is it's making it easier to be more both transparent and efficient at data sharing. I think there's a lot, a lot of data gets lost along our process, and that's usually because either it's not asked for or it's not asked for in a logical way, or if it is asked for, it's got nowhere to go. And so I'm hoping one of the things we're making easier is that basically the handovers and information, we're not actually asking for any new information to be created in most instances. We're just asking for it to not be lost along the process. And that's one of the things we're trying to make easier.

Right.

In the process of that, we're also trying to make it easier to do some types of environmental assessments. So because we've collated all this data about information— sorry, products and information materials, we can start to overlay a whole range of different insights on top of that. And so one of the insights we can do is to calculate the whole life carbon. So that's— which is something that is becoming increasingly common to do across the industry. And the way that we're trying to do it is an efficient, quicker way of doing it, but also integrated. It's like maximizing the use of the data that you're collecting. And that's just one of the KPIs that can be calculated once you've got this information. We can also calculate a circularity score, we can calculate recycled content metrics, and other things like that.

Right.

Okay. We also try to do other things as well, which are not necessarily making current problems easier, but are trying to showcase the potential future opportunities. So one of the insights that we provide through the platform is an assessment, or rather an approximation of the residual value And what we mean is like if you took all the materials in your building back to their raw commodities and forecast what their kind of base commodity price would be in the future when that building is going to be taken down, what would that value be? And this isn't necessarily meant to be, you know, an accurate representation of the value of the building like at all, but what it's trying to show is that the materials that you have have some worth. So, when you come to that redevelopment decision or refurbishment decision, you don't start with thinking they're worthless, or even more common, that they are a cost, like they're a burden. You start thinking, right, there is at least some amount of value there, and we should try and maximize that value, financial value, during this refurbishment or redevelopment.

And I'm just thinking, how granular does this get? So you mentioned fit-outs earlier.

So I think the thing about material passport frameworks and platforms like Modasta that try to implement these frameworks is that they can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be. So Modasta as a platform has the functionality to be used for everything from the tiniest screw, you know, all the way up to, you know, a portfolio or a city. And it's more around like what's, what's practical to achieve and what's useful to capture in terms of information. And we are continually trying to reach out to product manufacturers, like I said, to make their product-level information available. And that— and when you do get down to that level, it can be quite granular. So one of the manufacturers we already have using the system from Europe has uploaded 40,000 different products into their database, and they're all different kind of sinks and shower trays and things like that. And they've really gone down to like, what size is it, what color is it, what shape is it, and you can get very, very specific information if you want to capture that level of information. You might not want to, and you might choose to just focus on the higher carbon ones or the stuff that you think is going to be turned over most quickly, like your furniture. At the moment, these frameworks and platforms can be used in a very flexible way. I think that might start to get tightened up over the next few years through standards and regulation, but at the moment it's about working out what's going to add value to you, either during the design and construction process or for ongoing asset management.

I see. So it can also be used as a source of finding materials, I'd imagine then. So are there any materials of a certain type available locally? Is that an application?

So it's not an application that you would do necessarily within the Modasta platform. There are lots— there are platforms starting to emerge which kind of are more around that, like marketplace or inventory management, you know, and kind of the flows of materials in and out of products. So what we would like to be from Modasta's point of view is the custodian of the data that you would then, you know, make available into one of those places where you are looking. So like, I don't need this anymore, I'm going to put my data somewhere else into like the marketplace, into the inventory system. And that's where you would start to go looking for your, your reclaimed components. So we're not trying to solve that bit of the jigsaw ourselves. We want, we want to work with other partners to make that bit efficient. Okay.

And how specifically are you itemizing or registering different materials or items? I mean, is everything barcoded, or how are you actually doing that?

So within the platform itself, it's not barcode. They all have like unique IDs, just as most kind of like data platforms do. We rely predominantly on the element IDs from the BIM model, and then we add the product information to it, and then those two things together create your kind of your passport at that point in time. We have just done a collaboration that we were at FutureBuild in March and we did a collaboration with Natural Building Systems and GS1 and the Barcode Warehouse where we actually did pilots having a physical barcode on a product and that was scanned and then that could take you through into the Modasta platform. It was like Modasta held that data, and then you could link to it from a different kind of barcode or RFID system.

Right, so you've got third parties building applications onto the side of your database.

Exactly. So it's all about who you share the data with, and it's all very user-controlled about who you get to see that data. So it's not like anybody can walk past and scan, and scan your item. They've got to have permission to see where, where that scan goes. But it's another way of making that data more accessible throughout the whole life of the building rather than it getting lost.

Right. And what are the challenges in policing the database and making sure that the data that's entered is accurate and correct and up to date and reflects what's actually there?

I think that's going to be quite a challenge for all of these passporting initiatives over the next few years as we're all getting more and more familiar with them. From The product data, we have a few databases that we connect to that are already verified by third parties, and we make that very clear. Most of our manufacturer-provided data at the moment is self-declared rather than third-party verified, so that's obviously something that can be improved in the future. We're hoping that people will be able to get their self-declared information verified, hopefully at some point. And that's at the product level. And then at the building level, we still need to— again, not just as Modesto, like as the industry decide, like, who verifies that a model is accurate and acceptable. And I think it's going to be— it's not that dissimilar from a lot of other construction deliverables. You know, there's an onus, you know, placed on whoever you've asked to provide the deliverable that it is correct, and there's a certain number of quality checks done. It's just, as an industry, we'll have to get familiar with this extra, you know, way of sharing information and knowing what checks we need to do and how.

Does this support the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals, do you think?

The idea of a circular economy in general supports the goal around resource consumption. The ultimate idea of a circular economy is to provide the services that we all need, whether that's a home to live or food to eat, in a less resource-intensive way than we currently are. So that's what the circular economy is trying to achieve in general, and that is what Modasta is trying to facilitate as well. There's also supplementary kind of benefits from all that as well, because if we are using less stuff, less resources in general, we will have a lower carbon footprint responding to the climate goals, and also a huge amount of the kind of biodiversity impacts from materials are from their mining and extraction. So again, by using less or using less new or using less virgin, we're also supporting those kind of like biodiversity protection goals as well. Right.

You'd be familiar with Kate Raworth's book Donut Economics, I should imagine?

Very much so, yes.

You've read that more than once, maybe?

Yeah, I think the Donut Economics and the circular economy are They are very compatible. I really like how the Doughnut Economics kind of explicitly adds the social layer, the social justice foundation, which I think it's not that it's not part of circular economy, but it's not necessarily explicitly stated when you're talking about circular economy definitions, which are much more specifically around resource flows and monetary flows. But I think the circular economy has to be an integral part of creating the fair and just and environmentally acceptable planet that we'd all like to live in.

Right. And so do you see this Modasta then, or the database that you're creating there, driving innovation and new technology advances then in material use and construction techniques?

Possibly, but I think the thing that I hope that it can drive even more is two things. Firstly, business model innovation. So if we've got— if we're sharing data much more easily, we know where products are more easily, and we can have much more confidence in their quality, what they've been exposed to throughout their life, then it kind of unlocks a whole realm of business models around not just the reuse or resale of them, but also like those forward-thinking business models. Can we lease them instead of sell them? Can we offer a guaranteed buyback rate from the manufacturer's point of view from the very instance? So I think that's something that I think is quite exciting that the platform can enable. And kind of then linked to that, the thing we would really like, hope to be part of the solution is we call it enabling reuse at an industrial scale. Because the way that I see it at the moment is that the kind of the frontier of the circular economy in the built environment is reusing materials project to project. So, like, particularly in London at the moment, the leading projects are trying to source reclaimed steel from another project and use it in their project. And that's brilliant. It's great for The material use is great for carbon, but it's still kind of like the here and now. What we would like to facilitate is that kind of the mass reuse of building products across a geography or even across the globe, because you know enough about the stocks and flows of materials rather than it having to be kind of quite piecemeal like it is now.

Where do you think that Modasta can save its customers money?

I think the challenge is that we may be able to save customers money, but it's probably not right now, because it would be about, say, it would be about avoiding future spend from having to buy things again. So if you've, if you've bought all your steel, for example, that you're building, you're building out of now, and you design it to be dismountable and keep a good material passport record of it, when you are ultimately redeveloping your building, probably, you know, in the relatively near future rather than in the long-term future, you might be able to reuse that steel on your own project, and therefore you would not have to buy steel for your next project. So that's kind of like a medium to long longer-term cost saving. What the way we would be saving money now is if you did want this information, we believe that we can have it ready for you quick, more quickly, and therefore cheaper than doing it a different way, rather than it being an explicit cost saving in itself.

Okay. And do you think through the work you're doing there at Modasta that people are more likely to choose more durable materials that are more resilient in their material selection when they're undertaking a new project?

I think so. I think there's a range of drivers for that. I think carbon is already quite a strong driver for choosing something that's more durable that would need to be replaced less because we are increasingly looking at the whole-life carbon impacts of everything that we're doing. And also typically something that's durable might be more able to be reused rather than recycled at the end of its life, and more able to be disassembled rather than demolished. So I think there are kind of drivers for that. I also just think the transparency that you kind of start to get when you start to think about any of these things and collating information probably starts you to ask more questions as well. You know where it is, you're like, "Oh, where does it come from? Oh, well, where did it come from before that? What was the environmental impact there? What was the social impact there?" A whole range of cascading questions. I think it can open people's eyes to more about the impact in general, not just the financial impact and not just the quantified environmental impact, but the more general philosophical impact, if you like, of the materials we use.

Okay, just wondering if we— are there any more case studies you'd like to share with us?

One example that we recently created is we created a sample database of products that had been Cradle to Cradle certified. So Cradle to Cradle is a product certification standard, a sustainability one, very holistic and probably one of the toughest ones a manufacturer can go for. And we were co-exhibiting with a range of manufacturers, and we thought it would be really great to both showcase the power of their products, like being great products, and also the power of our platform to show off their products, as it were. So we created a small sample database where we created a product profile for I think there was about 6 or 7 of these different Cradle to Cradle certified products from right across the kind of built environment spectrum. We had a paint, we had a koya, which is an isolated timber which can be used for all sorts of different things. We had a roofing membrane, which you wouldn't normally think would be like the nicest, most sustainable thing, but this one, this was like the one, like the sustainable one that has the certification. And so what we were able to do by putting this showcase together was like, show the attributes of these products, like in their technical sense, also their environmental attributes, and then also their circularity attributes as well, because part of the Cradle to Cradle certification is to encourage the products to be circular. And it was a really nice kind of collaboration example showing the power of data to support already good initiatives.

And if people would like to get a hold of you, contact you, what is the best way of doing that if they want to learn more about Modasta?

There's two options. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm usually fairly responsive, or they can come and find out more about the platform at modasta.co.uk.

Great stuff. Once again, thank you very much for your time, Andrea. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you, Paul.