URMIBALI project: How digital documentation technologies can be a support for urban mining and reuse of building materials? A new method for data acquisition on traditional residential buildings in Liège.

Wallonia, like many European regions, has a diverse residential building stock, predominantly made up of single-family homes and pre-war traditional buildings. This stock is energy-intensive and requires renovation by 2050 to meet energy efficiency goals, alongside growing emphasis on circular economy, and sustainable resource and waste management. Energy renovations will lead to a significant rise in demolition waste, which already accounts for 39% of the region’s total waste. However, thanks to the Urban Mining concept, this waste is viewed as a valuable resource that can be reused in buildings or repurposed as raw materials.
Materials like wood, stone, bricks, and tiles, used in traditional buildings, remain underexplored in Urban Mining studies. Additionally, few studies have assessed the impact of energy renovations on waste flows, largely due to a lack of data and methods. Wallonia lacks data (with a high level of granularity) on its residential building stock, material deposits, and demolition waste flows. Obtaining those data requires time-consuming and resource-intensive studies due to the diversity of the building stock. Therefore, it is essential to develop a rapid, reliable, on-site method.
In this context, URMIBALI project aims to develop a method for acquiring detailed data to inventory and quantify the existing materials deposit. This method is based on both six case studies (built between the 13th and 20th century), digital documentation technologies commonly used in the field of heritage preservation and existing archaeological knowledge. The innovation lies in the bottom-up and interdisciplinary approach, the multi-material focus, and the potential for transferability to other types of building.
This contribution will provide a brief overview of the methodological approach. It will then present theoretical materials inventory based on the case studies and the data collected by digital technologies. Finally, it will discuss initial findings regarding the materials deposit and reliability of digital data.