Material passports for circular economy in the construction industry: state-of-art-review

Material passport constitutes a digital repository for tracking and recording the circularity characteristic of materials to support end-of-life recovery, recycling, refurbishment, and reuse. As essential enablers of the circular economy, this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the scientific literature on material passports in the construction industry. Drawing on a sample of 64 peer-reviewed articles, this study synthesized the lifecycle considerations, digital technologies, circular materials, and circularity characteristics prominent in material passports. The results revealed a significant rise in material passport research since 2016. However, the scientific material passport research has been dominated by evidence from Europe. Only 17% of the reviewed studies developed actual material passports for real-world projects, while the rest mainly developed conceptual frameworks and simulations. It is discovered that 40 digital technologies have been explored to develop material passports, with building information modelling dominating. Over 60 potential circular materials have been studied in the literature, where wood, concrete, aggregates, and steel received the highest attention. The key research gaps include fragmented lifecycle coverage of MPs, static BIM centric implementations and inconsistent definitions and measurement protocols for circularity characteristics. Therefore, this paper mapped the boundaries of the literature on material passports for circular economy in construction industry.