In the HORIZON 2020 project Buildings As Material Banks (BAMB) 16 partners from 8 European countries are working together with one mission – enabling a systemic shift in the building sector by creating circular solutions. Each brick, board, piece of wood or glass in a building has a value. These materials are often not reused after demolition or refurbishments, instead they are wasted, and a cost instead of an asset. Sustaining the value of the materials is the key to circular material use – and ways to harvest this value is at the center of the circular economy. Therefore, instead of becoming waste, buildings must function as banks of valuable materials – slowing down the usage of resources to a rate that meets the capacity of the planet.

The BAMB project is developing and integrating tools that will enable the shift from static building to circular buildings in relation to Materials Passports and Reversible Building Design. In order to bring circular building concepts to the everyday practice, the BAMB will also investigate how new circular business models can bring new business opportunities, and how policy propositions and data management (BIM) and decision-making models can support the implementation of circular building concepts.

During the course of the project these new approaches will be developed, demonstrated and refined with input from 6 international pilots, one of them being the Circular Retrofit Lab, built in Brussels (VUB campus).

The BAMB project started in September 2015 and will progress for three and a half years as an innovation action within the EU funded Horizon 2020 program.