EU-MAT: Effective Urban Material Mining in Cities ‑project
Project duration: 1.9.2025 — 31.8.2028
Funding program: Interreg Aurora
Project leader:
- Karelia University of Applied Sciences
Partners:
- Aalto University
- UAI The Arctic University of Norway
- RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
Abstract:
The global economy’s use of secondary materials dropped from 9.1% in 2018 to 7.2% in 2023, a 21% decline in five years. Accurate predictions of material quality and quantity from demolished buildings are essential to improve reuse in new structures and facilitate cross-border market development.
The EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) mandates significant energy reductions in buildings, emphasizing the need for renovations and better use of demolition waste. Non-residential buildings must renovate the worst-performing 16% by 2030 and 26% by 2033. This legislation highlights the need for renovations and optimizing waste material use from demolitions, addressing the broader issue of efficient, circular building material usage.
Finland aimed to reuse 70% of building and demolition waste by 2020, but the current rate is under 60%. Most of this waste (85%) comes from repairs and demolitions, with 15% from new buildings. In a circular economy, demolished buildings serve as material banks, but challenges remain: reclaimed materials often lack the CE marking required by EU regulations (ym.fi). Finland’s circularity rate is 4.4% year 2021 (globally 8.6%).
Norway’s Climate Change Act targets a 90–95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Reusing construction waste, such as low-carbon concrete, is key, potentially saving up to 120 kg of CO2 per m3. At 2.4%, Norway’s circularity rate, which was released in 2021, is below global average (8.6%). According to Sweden’s very first Circularity Gap Report, Swedes consume more than twice as many materials as the global average. At 3.4%, Sweden’s circularity metric reflects its current cultural, economic and geographic realities.
The ‘EU-MAT: Effective Urban Material Mining in Cities’ project addresses the low material circularity in construction across the northern regions of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, where logistical challenges and vast distances hinder efficient material reuse. One of the key barriers cited for not utilizing used building materials in a materials cascade, is concern and a lack of information about the availability and quality of these resources, making it difficult to match potential supply with new building projects. To overcome this specific obstacle, the project aims to develop an innovative urban material mining method that can accurately assess the quantity and quality of reusable materials from demolitions.
Through cross-border collaboration, the project will leverage material flow analysis, spatial modeling, and machine learning to create a mining method adaptable to northern cities. Especially in more sparsely populated areas, where transportation distances can be large, the re-utilization of recovered building products in new local construction projects can save considerably on transport and associated emissions. Moreover, localized reprocessing can create jobs helping strengthen the local economy.
Another major challenge addressed by EU-MAT is that buildings are hybrids, composed of many different materials and building products and there is lack of innovative solutions for new products using hybrid materials. EU-MAT will engage students and expert designs with local businesses to produce new building products to expand future re-usage scenarios for the reclaimed materials. Effectively reusing or recycling building products in this way will help reduce the impacts from the extraction of virgin materials as well as land-filling of construction and demolition waste, such as pollution, habit loss, and carbon emissions and thereby help protect biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Contact persons:
Jouni Luoma
Project Manager
[email protected]
+358 50 435 1435
Venla Heiskanen
Project Specialist
[email protected]
+358 50 596 4567