Today, both resource efficiency in general and the efficient use of natural resources specifically in the building sector are major political issues. Recent studies on resource efficiency have found the “anthropogenic stock” of the building sector to outweigh natural resource stocks. To make the anthropogenic stock accessible, material quantities with their individual composition need to be estimated and extrapolated to regional level. A geographical information system (GIS) is used as tool to handle the building specific data and combine them on regional level to calculate the anthropogenic stock. The resulting resource cadaster reflects the material quantities, divided into sixteen material fractions, of a specific residential district in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area—a typical urban area in Germany. The case study area was weighted in total between 103.5 kt and 93 kt, depending on the dataset. This paper offers a step-by-step description of this approach, whereby a consistent dataset was created throughout the process of data collection and validation. In order to demonstrate the broader application of the resource cadaster, the results were extrapolated to the residential building sector of the entire federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In highly concentrated areas, like the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan area, both area-wide classification of material quantities and their regional localization are necessary to make the anthropogenic stock accessible. Information about toxic substances, however, also needs to be included in the process of data collection. This method of mapping could thus provide the foundation for future (re)uses of this stock. This study offers some concrete steps in the direction of achieving a circular economy.

This article describes an approach for comparing material intensity values for residential buildings with different construction types. Based on the working drawings of the different construction types (wood and mineral), material intensities are calculated at the building level. Material intensities describe the materials used in a building in mass (tonnes (t)) in relation to the square meters (m²) of gross floor area (GFA) or the cubic meters (m³) of gross volume (GV). The method for determining material intensities at the building level is demonstrated. The results show that material intensities range from 0.61 t/m² GFA to 1.95 t/m² GFA for single-family residential buildings and from 1.36 t/m² GFA to 1.54 t/m² GFA for multi-storey residential buildings. The average material intensity for mineral buildings is twice as high as that for wood buildings, which means that there is a beneficial resource efficiency in building with wood instead of mineral materials. Therefore, benchmarks for a resource efficient building can be conducted based on these values. These values demonstrate a possibility to influence resource efficiency in buildings.