Building an innovative CDW business

Matter Site is a company that specializes in the automation of material data acquisition from pre-demolition sites. Providing accurate quantity, quality and location of materials for demolition companies. Enhancing urban mining practices like selective demolition and dismantling for a better utilization of buildings stocks.

Construction and Demolition Waste Context

At present, the construction industry is the ‘number one’ consumer of global raw materials while being one of the biggest producers of waste in the EU, where it accounts for approximately ‘25% to 30% of all waste generated’. The construction industry is facing a waste management issue compounded by a near-future resource scarcity problem; consuming more than what we can sustainably produce. On average, humans use more than ‘1,5 times the resources that the planet can provide’. This fact questions current material flows and supports the use of obsolete buildings as a source of second-life high-value assets and materials.

Technology Innovation Idea

Digitalization of pre-demolition sites for an organized and ready-to-access database.

Defining the Market

CDW Market

Total Addressable Market: The global construction & demolition waste recycling market size was valued at $126,897.2 million in 2019, and is expected to reach $149,190.9 million by 2027, registering a CAGR of 2.7% from 2020 to 2027.

Serviceable Available Market: This is conformed by european (mostly in countries with high recovery rates) demolition companies interested in a competitive secondary materials market that would create demand for both quantity and quality of waste material, thus directly increasing circularity.

Serviceable Obtainable Market: This is addressed by a bottom up approach with a revenue projection in the first 3 years of the company. This number depends on a per-project model, the amount of companies we will capture and the amount of buildings we will be able to obtain from each company. 

Target Customers

We are a B2B model.

Within the first year, we will provide a service to demolition companies in a new circular value chain. These medium to large scale early stagers are likely to be already participating in European projects and have their own research and development programs.

Value Proposition

This is an average of an ongoing case by case study where our main goal is to increase the capacity of the total recovered volume, increase the speed of the onsite disassembly and lastly to have an increasing amount of relevant material features.

Customer Value

The customer value is defined by the quantified recoverable material in a building, the quantity of buyers already found for materials (demand) and the value per ton of recycled concrete sold (strongest material value per building).

Implementation

Steps to get the service done.

Classification and Localization (Recovered information from sites)

Besides the information shown in the image, future developments can have higher concepts like “Dismountability” and the overall calculation of “Material Recovery Rate” based on local markets.

Planning Interface (Visible Output)

The user interface serves as a three dimensional environment displaying all the dataset gathered during the data acquisition from the building. This interface includes a search bar for components and materials, once, for example, a “brick wall” is found, several information appears at the side bars, showing the geo-located photographs and material localization imagery related to that material, along with other types of data like area, volume, quantity and precision of the localization for that particular searched material.

Customer Growth Plan

Costs

Project Pricing Model

Validation

Team

The team consists of architects with further knowledge and expertise in experimental digital fabrication, programming, and media. We started to collaborate during our master in “Robotics and Advanced Construction” in Barcelona in 2019 under a common interest: Transform the construction industry into a more responsible practice through the application of new technologies. 

Roadmap

What we are looking for?

Call to Action

Website

Matter Site is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Master in Robotics and Advanced Construction 2019/21 by:

Students: Matt Gordon and Roberto Vargas Calvo

Faculty: Davide Rovera