The UK Green Building Council’s (UKGBC) Materials Passport Practical Guide marks an important step towards standardising material documentation in construction, ensuring greater circularity and reuse of building components. This latest guidance provides clear and simple information for implementing Material Passports as a key tool in tackling the industry’s vast material waste problem. It’s a really great 2-page document which can be shared around your team and is easily digested.
It is worth noting that it aligns well with the previous Orms/Lancaster Uni and Waterman reports on the subject and is more of a hands-on “how-to” document aimed at both new builds and retrofits. Orms’ guidance focused on integrating passports into pre-demolition audits and encouraging a shift from demolition to deconstruction, and Waterman’s framework established a hierarchical passport system (Material, Component, System, Building) tied into BIM and regulatory compliance.
More than Just a Digital Tag
At its core, a material passport is more than a digital asset register. It provides:
Product sustainability data, including Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and embodied carbon metrics.
Material health and safety data, like VOC emissions for WELL and BREEAM.
Circularity insights, detailing disassembly methods, repair strategies, and end-of-life reuse pathways.
The guide emphasises that material passports aren’t just about current projects - they are an investment in a future where reclaimed materials become the norm. It promotes reuse hubs and platforms, such as Excess Materials Exchange, to track material flows across portfolios, an area previously advocated by Orms in its open-source database approach.
For me though, a key point is that we need greater standardisation of this. If different platforms, companies, or projects use inconsistent data structures, we risk fragmentation and inefficiency. Alignment on key fields, interoperability across digital systems, and secure, accessible storage will be critical to scaling adoption.
Time will tell if the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and the Digital Product Passport (DPP) initiative will drive us towards this kind of standardisation, but our industry also has a role in ensuring practical, universal standards are developed and adopted.
Who Owns the Passport?
The guide recognises that materials passports evolve over time, meaning responsibility for updating and maintaining them must be shared across multiple stakeholders. I think this is so important and really reinforces why we need to get these right - it must be easy to access, have relevant information (not necessarily everything which could be overwhelming and a burden) that is able to be maintained. For me the key is making material passports about the entire life of buildings or projects, not just something that is completed at project completion and forgotten.
Developers & asset owners should set the passport strategy
Design teams initiate and embed data collection at the design stage
Contractors ensure materials are logged and documented during construction
Manufacturers provide technical product details for passports
Facilities Managers keep records up to date during a building’s lifecycle
Why This Matters
The guide builds on the groundwork laid by Orms and Waterman by bringing short and simple clarity to the “how” of material passport adoption. It makes a strong case for digital passports as a due diligence tool, supporting both sustainability certifications and insurance for reused materials - two key challenges that have slowed adoption in the past.
For anyone in property and construction, embedding materials passports into projects now is not just about compliance, it’s about staying ahead of the inevitable regulatory and market shifts. Whether you’re a developer, consultant, or contractor, you have an opportunity to lock in material value and contribute to an industry-wide shift towards circularity.