Background: The building sector is a major sustainability challenge, responsible for around 37% of energy- and process-related emissions, half of natural material use, and one-third of solid waste generation worldwide. Circular Economy (CE) offers a promising pathway to mitigate these environmental burdens. CE strategies typically produce multi-dimensional and interconnected environmental effects, spanning energy consumption, carbon emissions, material use, and waste generation. Promoting CE in the building sector therefore requires robust evidence on the multi-dimensional sustainability contributions of CE strategies.
Question: Such an evidence relies on building stock data-enabled environmental effect benchmarking. Yet building stock data remains extremely scarce, confining most studies to single building-scale analyses. Large-scale building stock modelling has thus become a critical research problem.
Gap: Researchers have proposed some building stock models (BSMs) to address the problem. However, these models primarily focused on quantifying the individual environmental effects; as a result, they provide only a fragmented understanding of the sustainability benefits of CE strategies, rather than a comprehensive view of their overall sustainability contributions.
Aim: This research aims to develop an open-source BSM for comprehensively assessing the environmental sustainability contributions of CE strategies to the building sector. The United Kingdom (UK) is selected as a case area because its diverse and representative building stock ensures BSM generalizability. This study will: 1) identify critical building features for archetyping across energy, emissions, and material flows; 2) classify archetypes and determine the appropriate archetype number; 3) apply the multi-source data fusion method to derive the total stock of each archetype in the UK; and 4) integrate these elements into an open-source BSM.
Contributions: The developed BSM provides an open-source testbed for benchmarking the multi-dimensional environmental effects of CE strategies, thereby supporting evidence-based policymaking and industry practices. Its generalizability further enables the extension of these benefits beyond the UK to wider contexts.