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.

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