Buildings account for a substantial share of global material extraction and contain much of the world’s in-use material stock. As these stocks age, they can serve as secondary resources (urban mines), offering opportunities to recover and reuse end-of-life materials. However, most building material stock studies remain limited either by spatial scope or by the level of detail available at the national scale. In addition, while embodied greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly studied, buildings generate a broader suite of environmental impacts that must be considered when planning for sustainable construction.
This project develops a spatially explicit, building-level model of material stocks and embodied environmental impacts across Australia’s residential, commercial, and industrial building stock. The model uses detailed spatial information for individual buildings, enabling analysis from local precincts through to the national scale. An initial static assessment provides a baseline picture of how materials and embodied impacts are distributed across Australia’s built environment, highlighting differences between building types and occupancy patterns. For example, single-family homes tend to have lower embodied impacts per unit of floor area, partly because they rely more on timber, but they are land-intensive. Conversely, apartment buildings use land more efficiently, but their reliance on concrete and steel tends to increase embodied impacts per unit of floor area.
Building on this baseline, we extend the model to project Australia’s building material stocks and associated environmental impacts to 2070. The projections enable exploration of how future construction, demolition, population change, and building typologies may reshape material demand, waste generation, and embodied environmental burdens over time. By doing so, the model provides a flexible platform for testing alternative development pathways and identifying where interventions may be most effective.
By linking building-level spatial detail with long-term stock-flow modeling, this research supports informed planning for circular, low-impact, and resource-efficient built environments in Australia.