Superuse and upcycling through design: approaches and tools

Abstract

In Italy, first EU Country to have made Green Public Procurement (GPP) one hundred per cent mandatory, the recovery of construction and demolition (C&D) waste, the use of recycled materials and design for disassembly have been mandatory in public building projects since 2015. Nevertheless, in Italy, the renovation and substitution of existing buildings, not conceived to be easily deconstructed, generates 53 million tons/year of C&D waste (80% mixed inert waste) while the recovery rate is limited. Since 2012, the research team has been engaged on the increase of resource productivity in the building sector with two focuses. With the Atlante Inerti Project, co-funded by the EIT Climate-KIC, the team has experimented the upcycling of aggregates from the recovery of inert waste in prefab concrete design products for the building and outdoor furniture industries, testing innovative production techniques (large scale additive 3D printing). Simultaneously, the main research focus is the integration of adaptive reuse of buildings with superuse of components and materials: strategies inherent to the preservative Italian approach, complemental and preferable to recycling according to the EU Waste Hierarchy, still underestimated by the Italian legislation. The team has experimented the process of scouting construction/industrial waste materials at the local scale, with the application of the harvest map tool, to complex urban districts in Rome, in order to demonstrate how superuse and upcycling can represent reliable technical options widely replicable on a supply chain scale for increasing resource productivity in the building sector.