A design and construction philosophy focused on keeping materials in use for as long as possible - designing for disassembly rather than demolition, specifying reclaimed or recyclable materials, and treating a building's components as a future resource rather than eventual waste. It sits alongside embodied carbon reduction as one of the main levers for cutting a building's environmental footprint.

BIM supports circular-economy thinking in a very concrete way: a model with accurate material data becomes a material passport for the building - a record of exactly what is in the structure and where, making future disassembly, reuse, or recycling actually feasible instead of guesswork decades later.