Re‐use and recycling in the construction sector is essential to keep resource use in check. Data availability about the material contents of buildings is significant challenge for planning future re‐use potentials. Compiling material intensity (MI) data is time and resource intensive. Often studies end up with only a handful of datapoints. In order to adequately cover the diversity of buildings and materials found in cities, and accurately assess material stocks at detailed spatial scopes, many more MI datapoints are needed. In this work, we present a database on the material intensity of the Dutch building stock, containing 61 large‐scale demolition projects with a total of 781 datapoints, representing more than 306,000 square meters of built floor space. This dataset is representative of the types of buildings being demolished in the Netherlands. Our data were empirically sourced in collaboration with a demolition company that explicitly focuses on re‐using and recycling materials and components. The dataset includes both the structural building materials and component materials, and covers a wide range of building types, sizes, and construction years. Compared to the existing literature, this paper adds significantly more datapoints, and more detail to the different types of materials found in demolition streams. This increase in data volume is a necessary step toward enabling big data methods, such as data mining and machine learning. These methods could be used to uncover previously unrecognized patters in material stocks, or more accurately estimate material stocks in locations that have only sparse data available. This article met the requirements for a Gold‐Gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.

The recycling of demolition waste is essential to lower the construction sectors primary material demand, responsible for 50% of the global primary material consumption. Almost all demolition waste is used as filler material for the construction of roads, preventing further reuse or recycling after this application. The built environment generates considerable annual material in-and outflows. However, there has been little discussion on the availability and further application of this potential supply of secondary materials as a replacement for primary materials. In this study, we quantify the percentage of demolition waste that can be repurposed as secondary materials in the Dutch construction sector. We analyzed the yearly building material flows for the municipality of Leiden using municipal data on demolition and construction to explore the viability of the Dutch government’s policy goal to reduce primary materials consumption by 50% before 2030. From this analysis, we find that the recycling of demolition waste has a sizable potential but just falls short of the stated policy goal. Even in a situation with more construction than demolition, there will remain a considerable mismatch in the yearly construction material demand and available supply of demolition waste for our municipal-wide case study. More importantly, the current processing of demolition waste in the Netherlands will require significant improvements to achieve this goal. New governmental policies are required to focus on maintaining material quality and allowing further use of recycled materials as buildings materials.

Urban litter, such as cans, packaging, and cigarettes, has significant impacts, and yet little is known about its spatio-temporal distribution, with little available data. In contexts of data scarcity, crowdsourcing provides a low-cost approach to collecting a large amount of geo-referenced data. We consider 1.7 million litter observations in the Netherlands, collected by the crowdmapping project Litterati. First, we analyze the biases of this data at the province and municipality level. Second, in a local case study with high-quality data (the city of Purmerend), we investigate the spatial distribution of urban litter and the points of interest that attract it. This study's findings can support both the crowdmapping process, steer volunteers' efforts, and policy-making to tackle litter at the urban level. This article met the requirements for a gold–gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.

Increasingly, space for remanufacturing is seen as the most valuable resource to achieve circular economy (CE) policy goals, in particular for cities. However, in many cities, industrial urban areas are increasingly subject of – mostly circular designed - residential redevelopment. The proposition of this paper is that these diminishing industrial areas host, at least potentially, essential functions necessary to “close the material loop.” The reason why policy makers neglect the necessity of remanufacturing capacity, is because it is difficult to pinpoint the “ideal” geography of a circular loop. Most (circular) products can be transported limitless, thus their remanufacturing functions can be located around the world. But what if a critical material cannot be transported limitless and has circular potential? Therefore, this paper focusses on concrete for two reasons. First, concrete is by far the most abundant material in urban areas. Second, newly/circular made fluid concrete can only be transported for a limited time and distance. The hypothesis of this paper is that concrete plants are and will become essential for circular cities. Subsequently, we focus on the Dutch city of The Hague and combine a Material Flow Analysis with the locations of the concrete resupply chain. Our results show that potentially The Hague has a 100% circular concrete chain, but the importance of its concrete plant is (implicitly) neglected. We conclude that The Hague is illustrative for the problem of many circular cities that are without (implicitly) taking into account the whole circular resupply chain, jeopardized today a future urban CE.

The heating of buildings currently produces 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable heating technologies can reduce heating‐related CO ₂ emissions by up to 90%. We present a Python‐based GIS model to analyze the environmental and financial impact of strategies to reduce heating‐related CO ₂ emissions of residential buildings. The city‐wide implementation of three alternatives to natural gas are evaluated: high‐temperature heating networks, low‐temperature heating networks, and heat pumps. We find that both lowering the demand for heat and providing more sustainable sources of heat will be necessary to achieve significant CO ₂ ‐emission reductions. Of the studied alternatives, only low‐temperature heating networks and heat pumps have the potential to reduce CO ₂ emissions by 90%. A CO ₂ tax and an increase in tax on the use of natural gas are potent policy tools to accelerate the adoption of low‐carbon heating technologies.