Engineering the Future: Why structural and material records hold the key to a circular economy in construction

Increasingly, our projects involve refurbishment and extension, rather than new builds. This is great from a sustainability perspective. However, when we’re looking at an existing building, it’s often a battle to find existing structural information.

A couple of decades ago, when an engineer finished work on a project, paper copies of the drawings would be kept in archive boxes, which would then be moved to an archive storage facility after a certain time. For our current projects, it’s a similar situation but in digital format — the digital files go from a server to a digital archive. This means the logical first step in the hunt for records is to go to the original engineer.

If we can’t identify the engineer, then the methods become unsystematic: we can sometimes find information in building basements hidden in an old filing cabinet; occasionally, building control has some information (if the building is new enough); perhaps we find something in local archives, sifting through microfiche or old photos in the London Metropolitan Archives. Even if we succeed, we often find that the hard-worn drawings are architectural and show us what we already knew or could easily discover. Resourcing hundreds of hours for research is not always feasible within a project budget and can still end up in a fruitless search.

So, when we can’t find records, justifying existing structures often involves significant structural investigation works to both the substructure and superstructure. These can cause damage to the structure and have significant cost implications. If the structural elements are to be reclaimed and reused elsewhere, extensive testing and cataloguing are required. Both are often a hard sell to clients in terms of time and budget. In theory, the long-term goal for refurbishment and re-use is a circular economy. Circularity means that everything we’re putting into and taking out of a building should be retained in the supply chain, but if we don’t know what we have, this becomes a lot harder.

How do we go from the current haphazard and laissez-faire attitude to structural information storage, to a state where we can easily find, understand, and use clear documentation on our existing structures? Various initiatives aim to kick-start the process of record-keeping in the future.

The stock of materials stored in our buildings and infrastructure should be the primary source for the materials we use in the structures of the future

Publications such as the Material Passports Framework (Waterman) aim to create a standard for how we catalogue the materials in a building throughout the material’s life. Incoming EU legislation requiring Digital Product Passports is anticipated to become mandatory in Europe in the coming years.

Material Passports have been discussed at length in various publications, in terms of what information is stored and at what stage, but where detail tends to get hazy is how it is stored and maintained for the entire life of the building. There are several developing and existing platforms of varying scales aiming to pave the way for a national materials database, but the future of large-scale storage remains unclear. If multiple privately owned platforms exist, will building owners be tied to paying subscriptions in perpetuity? This could lead to lapses in maintenance of sites and inconsistency between different platforms. The alternative is a government-run national database — created with funding that doesn’t yet exist.

Likewise, there is similar ambiguity with the recent Building Safety Act in the UK, which requires the ‘golden thread of information’ to be maintained and stored for the entire lifetime of the building. However, other than ensuring that the data is kept digitally, secure, presentable, and available when needed, it’s up to the owner how they do it. Is this enough? Would it not make sense for building control, who require a copy of all relevant information for planning, to have a more centralised role in storing this information?

Currently, they keep records for 15 years, so even without adding new buildings, keeping the records they currently have in perpetuity would mean a vast increase in staffing and storage capacity, along with associated costs, maintenance, and operational energy usage. If the duty remains with the building owners, will we just switch from finding a damp set of drawings in a basement to finding a damp hard drive in the basement? Or an online platform whose owners have gone out of business and can no longer be accessed?

Given the amount of data that will be generated in the push for circularity, serious consideration needs to be given to how the vast quantity of information on all building components is stored, accessed, and maintained in perpetuity — both in terms of ease of access and also the monetary and carbon cost of storage.

It seems, as always, that the way forward lies in legislation and funding, and the removal of responsibility from the individual. All the great company-led frameworks and portals require the government to adopt, fund, and maintain their usage if there’s any hope of them being widely adopted and maintained for longer than the life of the founding company. The stock of materials stored in our buildings and infrastructure should be the primary source for the materials we use in the structures of the future, so information on what ‘we’ collectively have should be treated with appropriate importance.