Suomeksi

EU-MAT: Effective Urban Material Mining in Cities

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.

Project Duration

1.9.2025 — 31.8.2028

Project Manager

Jouni Luo­ma
jouni.luoma(a)karelia.fi

Project Funding

Inter­reg Auro­ra