IN Brief:
- The €5m Horizon Europe programme will develop harmonised producer-responsibility models for construction products.
- Demonstrators in France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands will cover flooring, pipes, and sanitary equipment.
- Digital product passports, QR codes, fee structures, and recyclability protocols will support product traceability and recovery.
The BUILDERS project has begun a 36-month programme to design, test, and validate extended producer responsibility schemes for construction products across Europe.
Supported by almost €5m of Horizon Europe funding, the project will focus initially on plastic construction products and examine how manufacturers can take greater responsibility for products and materials after installation and use.
Real-world demonstrators will operate in France, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. Three product families — flooring, pipes, and sanitary equipment — have been selected to test whether common principles can work across different service lives, ownership models, removal methods, and recycling routes.
The consortium is coordinated by French plastics and composites technical centre IPC. Partners include research institutes, producer-responsibility organisations, building-performance specialists, standards bodies, recyclers, manufacturers’ associations, universities, and public agencies.
Extended producer responsibility transfers a greater share of end-of-life cost and organisation towards companies placing products on the market. The model is established in sectors such as packaging and electrical equipment but remains fragmented in construction, where products may stay installed for decades and pass through several owners.
BUILDERS will develop eco-modulated fees, allowing charges to reflect durability, reparability, reusability, recycled content, and ease of recycling. A product designed for straightforward recovery could therefore carry a different cost from one that is difficult to identify, separate, or process.
The programme will also establish recyclability protocols and business models centred on reducing, reusing, repairing, and recycling. Those models must account for the fact that many construction products enter the waste stream through refurbishment and partial replacement rather than complete demolition.
Traceability forms a central part of the work. Digital product passports, GS1 standards, and QR codes will be tested as ways of connecting physical products with information on composition, origin, installation, maintenance, disassembly, and recovery.
Reliable product data could reduce one of the principal barriers to reuse: uncertainty. A contractor removing an old floor, pipe system, or sanitary component may not know its exact composition, age, treatment, fire classification, contamination risk, or whether a recycler will accept it.
Digital records can improve that position, although the information must remain accessible for much longer than an ordinary construction project platform. A product installed in 2027 may not be removed until several software providers, owners, and regulatory systems have changed.
Long-term governance therefore carries more weight than the QR code itself. The programme will need to address who owns the data, who updates it after repair or alteration, how access is maintained, and what happens when the original producer no longer trades.
The demonstrators will also expose practical collection problems. Flooring is often bonded to substrates or contaminated by adhesives; pipes may be concealed, mixed with fittings, or difficult to separate by polymer; sanitary products can contain several materials and may be removed in damaged condition.
A theoretical recycling route has limited value where collection costs exceed the recovered material value. Producer-responsibility fees could support logistics and processing, but the scheme must avoid imposing disproportionate administration on contractors handling small quantities across dispersed refurbishment sites.
Manufacturers will also require confidence that recovered material has consistent quality. Contamination, additives, ageing, colour, and mixed polymers can prevent closed-loop use in the same application.
Recyclability protocols and test methods must distinguish material that is technically recoverable from material that can be used commercially at the required standard. Without that distinction, headline recycling rates can conceal a shift into low-value applications.
The project sits alongside wider movement towards lower-carbon products and more detailed environmental evidence. The use of lower-carbon cement across an entire residential structure shows material innovation moving from isolated trials into complete projects, while BUILDERS extends lifecycle assessment towards recovery and end-of-use responsibility.
Procurement could provide an important route to market. Clients can specify take-back arrangements, digital product information, recycled content, and disassembly plans, although inconsistent requirements across countries may add cost without creating enough recovery volume.
BUILDERS is intended to produce harmonised recommendations rather than another set of isolated national schemes. Common rules could allow manufacturers and recyclers to invest across a larger market, while local collection infrastructure and waste regulation would still shape delivery.
Life-cycle and social life-cycle assessment will examine whether the proposed models produce measurable benefits rather than simply shifting cost between parties. Transport distances, storage, cleaning, processing energy, replacement intervals, and worker conditions all influence the final outcome.
The four-country demonstrators will provide an early test of whether producer responsibility can operate around construction’s long product lives and fragmented ownership. A workable system must make recovery routine at project level while giving manufacturers a commercial reason to design products that remain identifiable, separable, and useful after their first installation.
