With climate change becomming a widely spoken about subject this year, we want to share with you one of our favourite talks about an innovative and digitally ground-breaking method which reduces and reuses waste products when designing and developing spaces to help create a sustainable, healthier, and cleaner planet.

Excess Materials Exchange, a young and pioneering technology company, established “The Dating Site Approach for Secondary Materials” to tackle the current climate emergency.

Using a unique digital matching platform, suppliers with excess waste materials, from the demolition of buildings for example, are matched using quantifiable metrics and are supplied to buyers who require the same material for their design. This accelerates the global transition to a circular thinking of reusing and recycling waste materials to create a new, high-value secondary material with an alternative use rather than unsustainably discarding them at the expense of the planet’s survival.

This matching system has long-term social, economic and environmental benefits as material flows increase by an average of 110% in monetary value and the ecological footprint is reduced by an average of 60%.

A Success Story

The 70,000 tonnes of material used for matching and exchanging in their pilot study caused the following:

• Saved energy equal to using public lights in Paris for 5 years.
• Reduced water usage equal to 860 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
• Reduced CO₂emissions enough for all 863,000 Amsterdam citizens to drive to Milan.
• 54 million EUR reduction in environmental costs.

This digital matching platform has shown how companies can start adopting a circular approach by designing and producing their products in a more efficient and environmentally conscious manner. Designers are at the beginning of all building stories. We have the unique ability to transform existing products into a newly purposed, high-quality product whilst simultaneously promoting the primary idea of reusability. Ask yourself – how can you promote the message of sustainable development through your designs and materials?  We now have the technological resources to access financially and ecologically valuable secondary materials which contribute to building a more viable, healthier planet now and for the future.

Watch their TED Talk below to learn more….