Material Index
Making Reuse Viable: Reclamation Costs, Values and Tender Guidance
Material Index (MI) is a UK based circular economy company. Their digital platform catalogues, manages, and sells reclaimed and refurbished materials. They licence their platform and also have a large site based team for auditing, brokering and moving materials.
Their 2025 Blueprint project was to provide industry guidance to solve problems they have come up against too many times!
A building full of beautiful, valuable materials, which they know are commercially viable to reclaim, but others do not. Typically, project managers and building owners will not include the saving and selling of materials in a demolition contract as there is perception that doing so will cost more than the value gained, and will be contractually complex. However, reclamation can be viable, particularly if supported by the right processes, such as quality audits, the right contractual mechanisms, to ensure it is not over-priced, and if it is done at the right stage, to ensure it is included in the project programme.
In their Blueprint project they set out to provide useful data on costs, values and processes so reclamation can be priced in at early project budgets and included in demolition tenders.
Making Reuse Viable: Reclamation Costs, Values and Tender Guidelines
One of the most persistent barriers to material reuse isn't technical, it's commercial. Material Index has spent years watching valuable materials get demolished and discarded, not because reclamation was impossible, but because no one could price it with confidence. Their 2025 Blueprint project takes direct aim at that problem, producing practical cost, value and tender guidance to make reuse a viable line item from the very start of a project.
Download to read more about the steps they've taken so far, outcomes and learnings from their work, and what is upcoming for them.
