Material Metabolism
The Material Metabolism team measures the physical flows of cities — what enters, circulates, and leaves the built environment each year, and the embodied carbon carried with it.
What we research
The Material Metabolism team measures what cities are made of. Each year, a city imports millions of tons of steel, concrete, glass, masonry, wood, and finishing material, uses most of it to extend or modify its building stock, and discharges the rest as construction-and-demolition waste. The team tracks those flows quantitatively and the embodied carbon that moves with them.
We work from named public datasets — permit records, disposal manifests, commodity trade data, building inventories — to build open, reproducible estimates of a city's material metabolism. The output is used by researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners who need credible numbers for circular-economy strategy and embodied-carbon policy.
Our first publication, Building Prosperity in New York, is an economic case for circular building practice grounded in New York's specific material flows. It was published alongside the New York Sustainability Index.
Current focus areas
- Embodied carbon accounting across building types and construction eras
- Construction and demolition waste flows at municipal scale
- Circular-economy case studies grounded in named datasets
- Adaptive reuse pathways and the material savings they unlock
Team lead
Jeremy Edwards — Founder and Director of Research.