Reclamation potential in the built environment: A method and metric for assessing environmental benefits beyond first use

Abstract

Direct reuse and recycling of materials can significantly reduce the net environmental impact of the global construction sector. The feasibility of reuse and recyclablity of building systems is affected by the materials used and the interfaces between constituent components, but there is a lack of quantitative methods for assessing the environmental benefits of alternative recovery strategies for multi-component and multi-material systems over the building lifetime. In this work, a new assessment method was developed to enable a quantitative evaluation of the transient environmental reclamation potential (RP). The reclamation potential is a measure of the ability to disassemble and reuse recovered building elements at their end-of-life and is influenced by the constituent components and the interfaces between components. The proposed method accounts for the technical service lifetimes of components, including performance degradation over time, and can thus inform decisions on the most suitable recovery route. The graphical outputs from the RP assessment are a network diagram which highlights the system components and connections between components, and an RP-graph which illustrates the reclamation potential and the embodied carbon over time of alternative reuse/recycling strategies. The methodology is demonstrated on a representative glazed double-skin façade where the influence of component service lifetimes and replacements over time are quantified in terms of embodied energy and embodied carbon. This novel method provides a systematic and quantitative means of assessing complex building systems based on the ability to recover the systems and constituent components at their end-of-life. The outcomes of the assessment can guide decision-making in design for disassembly (DfD) strategies and/or aid in the identification of high-value material recovery strategies at the end-of-life stage.