Meh.
The idea at the core of this is that you have to keep demolishing and rebuilding things, instead of making them to last in the first place.
What should the lifespan of a building be? 1 year? 10? 100? 1000? How does this 'material passport' need to last and be interpreted? How long until a database becomes 'legacy' code that's difficult to access?
The reality is that people re-used building materials for millennia using human skill instead of silly digital tech
Yes, that's fair; but right now in the UK, the thrust of the article (with which I agree) is we are *not* reusing as much as we could be....
@ChrisMayLA6 Yes, that's true. Planning departments are too ready to allow demolitions and are not prioritising future-proof building practices (eg. energy efficiency)
At the same time, there is too much focus on flashy tech solutions - let's put bricks on the blockchain and that will fix everything! 
We need a different way of thinking about these problems entirely
@Talia @ChrisMayLA6 I think it's a side-effect of real estate being a long-term financialized asset bubble, which has in turn made demolition/reconstruction "affordable" (by making the land asset a colateral for immense loans, against which the cost of construction is lost in the small print).
But … Germany is big on demolition/replacement of housing stock? But always with better environmental standards. And most people rent their homes, and houses are depreciating assets.
@cstross @ChrisMayLA6 yes, hard agree
while literally every activity/process/object/phenomenon is measured against it's ability to be transmuted into money, it's going to be hard to solve our actual problems
@Talia @ChrisMayLA6 I keep saying only fully automatic luxury gay space communism will save us from climate change now, and I'm barely even joking …
