SUM4Re proposes a comprehensive approach to creating materials banks from the built environment by combining urban mining and technologies for automated on-site data acquisition and building materials identification and asset components. The project aims to achieve nine objectives, including developing a traceability system for building materials, developing a holistic methodological framework for assessing circular use of construction products, and developing on-site and off-site smart digital solutions to identify construction entities and analyse their properties. The methodology of SUM4Re is based on a systemic approach that encompasses three main activities: identification, analysis, and contribution to circularity. The project aims to develop software tools and databases based on robust identification assisted by AI and other digital techniques, supported by blockchain solutions, and consider circular economy processes such as Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle, and Renovate. SUM4Re will improve the BIM standard to support current circular (C-BIM) challenges, following open standards and ensuring interoperability with commercial databases. SUM4Re proposes three demonstration pilots linked to construction projects to validate the methodology and a strategy for skill development to upskill the workforce in the construction sector and facilitate the uptake of the solutions developed. Overall, SUM4Re aims to support the transition towards circular construction practices and reduce the amount of construction and demolition waste sent to landfills. The relevance of the project lies in the need to address the increasing generation of construction and demolition waste, which is the largest waste stream in the EU, as well as the problems associated with CO2 emissions and climate change. The project emphasizes the use of new techniques and technologies to rapidly identify materials and support circular construction practices.

The construction sector faces unprecedented challenges in meeting EU climate and circularity goals, with buildings accounting for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions. Despite available digital technologies, the industry struggles to implement sustainable practices, particularly among SMEs who represent over 90% of the sector. Current digital solutions remain fragmented and often inaccessible, creating barriers to widespread adoption of sustainable practices. INTEGRATES addresses these challenges by developing an innovative framework that connects Building Information Modelling, Digital Twins, and data-driven services through an intelligent knowledge architecture. The project will achieve this through three key innovations: - A unified ontology-based knowledge framework, supported by neuro-symbolic AI, bridging existing building data standards - User-centric digital tools for SME adoption, featuring AI-assisted workflows that reduce design and planning time, and facilitate operation and resource recovery - An integrated platform connecting building lifecycle phases through Digital Product Passports and Digital Building Logbook These innovations will be validated through four complementary demonstration cases spanning different building types: a public building end-of-life transformation in Italy, a residential renovation in Bulgaria, a smart district optimization in Belgium, and a new construction project in Spain. The project targets reduction in renovation planning time, increase in material reuse rates, improvement in energy efficiency, and active implementation by local SMEs. Through participation in standardization committees and regional networks, INTEGRATES will drive lasting change in the European construction sector. The consortium brings together 16 partners from 9 countries, combining research institutions, technology providers, and regional innovation hubs to ensure both technical excellence and practical implementation focused on SME need

The CIRCOFIN project brings together 4 cities and regions to transition to a circular economy in the construction and buildings sector. Munich, Copenhagen, Scotland and Lisbon will prepare investment-ready circular construction hubs (CCH) and showcase how they transform local and regional markets for secondary building components and materials. CCH cover physical material banks and digital infrastructure to provide the resource basis for the EU Taxonomy requirements for construction. To date, CCH have not successfully scaled-up across Europe. The project will demonstrate that CCHs can become bankable projects at scale and provide lucrative investment opportunities for financiers. The showcases develop sound technical, business, and financial plans of more than 80 M€ total investment volume. CIRCOFIN streamlines a common project development assistance (PDA) methodology for CCH, used and validated by the showcases. The methodology results in a CCH Toolbox, which consists of customizable components for all project development stages, from pre-feasibility to due diligence and bankability appraisal. It covers all elements of CCH – physical design, digital infrastructure, logistics, business models, operation models and financial models. The results will be published as a CCH Cookbook with concrete facts and figures, ready for widespread replication by other cities and regions. Replication and roll-out aim to trigger uptake in 30 other cities and regions from the CCRI, Circular Cities Declaration and the Mission Cities of the 100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities Mission. Investors and EU financial initiatives will gain expertise in advising CCH projects via robust technical and operational insights and learn how to review associated risks, to make better investment decisions on circular economy projects. Standardization will on CEN and ISO as well as policy recommendations improve regulation to enable business and investment cases for CCH market uptake in Europe.

Circular economy aims at reducing value loss and avoiding waste, by circulating materials or product parts before they become waste. Today, lack of support for sharing data in a secure, quality assured, and automated way is one of the main obstacles that industry actors point to when creating new circular value networks. Together with using different terminologies and not having explicit definitions of the concepts that appear in data, this makes it very difficult to create new ecosystems of actors in Europe today. This project will address the core challenges of making decentralized data and information understandable and usable for humans as well as machines. The project will leverage open standards for semantic data interoperability in establishing a shared vocabulary (ontology network) for data documentation, as well as a decentralized digital platform that enables collaboration in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. The project addresses a number of open research problems, including the development of ontologies that need to model a wide range of different materials and products, not only providing vertical interoperability but also horizontal interoperability, for cross-industry value networks. As well as transdisciplinary research on methods to find, analyse and assess new circular value chain configurations opened up by considering resource, information, value and energy flows as an integral part of the same complex system. Three industry use cases, from radically different industry domains, act as drivers for the research and development activities, as well as test beds and demonstrators for the cross-industry applicability of the results. The developed solutions will allow for automation of planning, management, and execution of circular value networks, at a European scale, and beyond. The project thereby supports acceleration of the digital and green transitions, automating the discovery and formation of new collaborations in the circular economy.