Of all the industries that require a sustainable transformation to succeed in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, the construction sector is perhaps the most influential. Construction alone contributes to 23% of air pollution, 50% of climate change, 40% of drinking water pollution, 50% of landfill waste, and 40% of worldwide energy usage. Accounting for nearly 50% of annual global CO2 emissions, the built environment poses an existential threat to our planet.  The main reason is the “take-make-waste” model of construction materials. They are produced, put in a building and then – after sometimes just 5-6 years – disposed. While decision-makers and industry leaders are eager to adopt new technologies to address these problems, the development of necessary solutions is still slow and industry needs new tools to implement new practices, including to help guide decisions towards a closed-loop “take-make-reuse” mentality by making better use of data.

In the construction industry use case of Onto-DESIDE the objective has been to design a circular value network for reuse, refurbishment and recycling based on semantically linked data that makes it possible to further use construction components from a building. The use case accounted for the following two scenarios in supplying components/materials back to the manufacturer; the construction component is (1) reusable in its whole, or (2) as a secondary raw-material.  For this use case one product from Lindner Group, i.e., the Nortec floor system, was selected and used as the object from which to elicit the information needs. The hypothesis was that Rang-Sells, together with Concular, could implement a take-back system for Lindner floor products, and outline ways to integrate that into current practices. 

The Onto-DESIDE project has identified challenges in such a new value chain, but also demonstrated the feasibility of secure data sharing along the value chain to enable decision making, e.g. whether to reuse, refurbish, or recycle materials. Through a combination of applying the Open Circularity Platform, for publishing and sharing data on  used floor systems, and the commercial reuse platform Restado by Concular, the data flows of a take-back-system have been explored. The Onto-DESIDE ontologies, CEON, act as a vocabulary for semantic interoperability and data exchange between the systems, and supports the decision making by actors along the value chain.