1 Triton Square - Material Passport
Project summary
Material Index were appointed to create a single source material passport for this complex retrofit project at 1 Triton Square, enabling any future projects to understand what is in the building and what can be shared with any other buildings if further retrofit occurs.
Reuse summary
Over 1100 different assets were recorded, all with attached data information to help in their identification, and stored within the Material Index platform database.
Project information
Location | London, UK |
Project type | Retrofit |
Material passporting |
Sector | Office to laboratory space |
Project stage | RIBA Stage 5-6 |
Key dates | Construction began in 2025 |
Key facts/highlights
- The original building was built in 1998 as a dedicated office building for the first national bank of Chicago. The building underwent significant refurbishment in between 2018-2021, including 3 additional office levels added in steel construction with a concrete frame and steel stability frames strengthened at each corner. The existing atrium was partially in-filled, and the building service systems were renewed.
- In 2025, works began to convert the building from offices to laboratory spaces.
- The ambition of the material passport was to capture a full catalogue of new services and fit-out, as well as the retained structure and envelope, to facilitate future material management through seamless pushing of materials to storage/internal exchange across British Land’s portfolio or to the Material Index marketplace and trade partners.
- The material passport is a single source of information for this retrofit, enabling future projects by providing access to a wide range of information via the user-friendly MI platform, which uses AI for data sourcing and matching, all backed up for at least 30 years
- Cataloguing materials during installation, as opposed to pre-deconstruction results in more data at higher quality and provides a longer time-frame to plan for reuse. This ultimately lowers costs, reduces waste, and improves sustainability, supporting circular economy principles, as well as establishing environmental benchmarks for embodied carbon.
- Information was pooled from a range of sources, including site visits, O&M manuals, BIM models and working construction files, to form sufficient data for each asset within the project.
Lessons learned
Challenges involved receiving sufficient data from the contractor supply chain during the construction process, where the priority was completing the works, and highlighted that efficiencies in standardising material passport data collection could have many benefits.
One of the complexities of the project was that different file types are available from different points in the building cycle, meaning many data sources needed cleaning before being processed on the Material Index platform. Therefore a significant period of time was spent cleaning the data before entering into the platform. As much as possible has been verified during site inspections using the MI platform.
Links/resources
ASBP's Reuse Now Campaign
This case study is part of the Reuse Now Campaign. The campaign builds upon the ASBP-led DISRUPT project, which is exploring the innovative reuse of structural steel in construction through the creation and adoption of new circular business models. Project partners and supporters include reuse stalwarts Cleveland Steel & Tubes, global construction specialist ISG, National Federation of Demolition Contractors, and Grosvenor, the world’s largest privately-owned international property business.
ASBP has been working on the topic of material reuse for nearly 10 years, with past activities including the Re-Fab House feasibility study, research with University of Cambridge identifying the barriers to structural steel reuse, and more recently, a sold-out Reuse Summit.
This previous experience is further enhanced with in-house expertise from Technical Director Dr. Katherine Adams and Research Associate Dr. Asselya Katenbayeva, who bring 25+ years of academic and industry-focussed research and development on the topics of waste, reuse and circular economy.