Romulus Reuse Initiative

Innovation overview and development

The Romulus Reuse initiative is a public private collaboration with the City of London and using a dedicated platform to create digital transparency for building data. City of London Corporation are sponsoring the initiative with the intent to bring together the key contractors, clients, architects and consultants working in both the Square Mile and London more broadly to share building data and encourage circular economy.

Project data will be shared within a digital product passport enabled format that is accessible to all participants and patterns of reuse and recovery will be traced and shared. Participants will be encouraged to work together, drawing on their expertise to help address existing challenges to the creation of a viable market. The intent is to encourage interoperability with various platforms and marketplaces that are active in the circular economy space.

How the digital innovation was developed

Romulus was developed through a collaboration with circular built environment consultancy Maconda and software provider Upcyclea as well as input from Cardiff University. Drawing on experience from an Upcyclea pilot in France within the social housing sector, Maconda developed the innovation for use in the UK with guidance from Cardiff University. City of London Corporation endorsed the innovation along with the NLA and GLA, and it launched on the 18th of November 2024.

Romulus was premised on the basis that digital transparency of reclaimed materials is the most effective means of scaling circular economy, using a case study piloted in France as inspiration and then working with UK partners to develop an effective model that could create the conditions for a viable circular economy marketplace in London.

Give details on the measurable commercial results

The City of London Corporation are sponsoring the initiative to demonstrate their commitment to meeting their Net Zero goals, through ensuring sustainable growth in construction within the City. The initiative will create greater transparency by encouraging building audits to be digitized and using Digital Product Passports to capture and structure product & material data within a common template.

This will accelerate circular economy in the City by allowing far greater access to available secondary products as well as clients to reclaim some capital value as they sell and exchange construction and fit out materials. This will create incentives for further expansion of the circular economy model as value chains become more mature. The innovation will use a Resource Manager to quantify, trace and report on all material flows that occur within Romulus and report avoided carbon, waste and financial returns to provide evidence to support a circular business case.

Romulus will also allow SME’s and community organisations far easier access to reclaimed products and materials that can support their growth and reduce their costs, driving social value as well as increasing opportunities for employment and skills training.

How does this innovation improve processes

Policymakers such as the City of London will oversee the pilot to learn more about how circular economy processes work and identify how these can be supported with planning policy and targeted interventions, as well as how to implement this for their own projects. Central government representatives from the Department of Energy Security & Net-Zero will also be examining the implications for national circular economy strategy in construction.

This innovation will also support contractor and client decarbonisation strategies. Key industry participants will join a forum as part of Romulus that will regularly meet and review data, as well enhance existing relationships to build trust, manage complexity in the reuse process and enable the innovation to scale. They will share experience in operationalising circular economy which will be used to develop best practice, standards and evolve new approaches to barriers and challenges.

How might this innovation influence the specification

Currently specifiers face immense challenges to reliably specify reclaimed materials. Firstly, there is no transparency on the supply of reclaimed products. Secondly, information about the products and materials is unstructured and often widely dispersed, making it difficult to collect and consolidate. Existing systems emphasise spot trading between strangers which makes it difficult to verify and audit. All of this contributes to unstable and fragmented demand and supply for reclaimed products.

Romulus is an innovative step towards solving these challenges by creating a reusable materials market that supports the core industry needs of collaboration and sustainability. Specifiers will have far greater visibility over the supply of products with sufficient time to feed into design phases. They will also be working with trusted and qualified sources of reuse from industry peers with established quality control processes and sufficient market power support integrated logistics and create a critical mass.

Creation of novel internal systems to produce eco-innovation

The intent of the Romulus initiative is to create critical mass by using local authorities and key members of the industry to anchor a circular economy market while also enabling interoperability with other marketplaces. We believe that collective action is essential to achieving the industry’s ambition to reduce embodied carbon and promote a circular economy. The key internal system is the use of a resource manager as a ‘supply chain orchestrator’ to match demand and supply using the digital platform and also support with logistics and negotiation among the partners. This helps all participants to develop internal processes to manage the interaction with circular economy as well ensure that they do not need to invest in immediate training or resourcing to be able to engage with the initiative.