From Conventional Recycling to Creative Reuse: Empowering Local Industrial Resources Through Synergistic Practices (original) (raw)
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Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019
Today, a significant portion of steel production worldwide is coming from recycling practices. It is inevitable that the smelting process during steel recycling operations is expensive and consumes a tremendous amount of energy. Therefore, hypothetically, direct reuse of steel materials without smelting can be environmentally and economically advantageous over recycling. In this article, an innovative recovering path for size-specific sheet metal scrap from the automobile industry is being proposed. The idea is to directly use the sizable sheet metal scrap generated from the car-body manufacturing process in the automobile industry to design and fabricate new metal facade systems for buildings’ exteriors. An empirical case study was conducted, which is being presented to illustrate the benefits of reusing steel scrap over recycling with the same material using quantitative analysis. The required capital cost and energy consumption of generating a building metal facade system were evaluated. The results showed that reusing the sheet metal scrap over conventional recycling of the same material would lead to a cost reduction of approximately 40% (400 $/ton) and savings of approximately 67% (10 MJ/kg) of energy consumption. The tested concept promotes an innovative industrial symbiosis between the auto industry and the building and construction industry through creating a secondary closed supply-chain loop to achieve both circular economy and energy savings through adding value by design.
Waste and Biomass Valorization, 2020
Purpose This study suggests an alternative approach to valorize non-hazardous industrial solid waste flow into construction materials, in particular as metal façade systems by quantifying the creative reuse of consistent and predicated sized scrap metal cutouts (known as Offal) that were generated from the automotive sheet metal stamping and blanking manufacturing processes. Methods This study is an expansion on two papers presented at the 10th International Conference on the Environmental and Technical Implications of Construction with Alternative Materials (WASCON). Automotive sheet metal waste stream was transformed into two novel building facade system designs and a "cradle to gate" Life Cycle Assessment was carried out to analyze their environmental impacts and its resultant effect on design, manufacturing and economy. Results A Material Design Circularity Factor was introduced to compare both façade systems. Design #1 had greater impacts for all indicators except for operational energy due to the possibility of infiltration. Economically, design #1 had almost double the savings of design #2 at approximately four million dollars annually. The avoided carbon emissions made it evident that the creative reuse of Offal had significant environmental impacts. The two facade systems avoided 7.8 and 5.3 million kg CO 2-eq. of greenhouse gas emissions for design #1 and design #2 respectively. Conclusion Industrial Symbiosis is a viable concept that can lead to the adoption of circular economy principles to activate reuse over recycling for industrial by-products, which was promoted by creativity, saved manufacturing energy and the reduced costs of production of construction materials. This study proved that reusing automotive metal scrap for building envelopes is environmentally optimal and economically affordable.
2018
In 2004, Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake of the Philadelphia-based award- winning architectural firm, KieranTimberlake published their book, Refabricating Architecture. The architects argued that after a century of failure, the discipline of architecture could learn something from other manufacturers such as the automobile industry. The book was the result of the inaugural FAIA Latrobe Fellowship that funded a comparative study of the processes utilized by the aerospace, automobile, and shipbuilding industries and those of the building industry. The research was based on critical observation and analysis of the current practice of architecture and construction as well as an investigation of the industrial processes that advanced the efficiency, tolerance, and fabrication methods while the discipline of architecture remained as lacking behind. While the intent of the authors’ work is compelling, the comparison remained unfair to architecture due to the issues of quantity and mass production. Repetitiveness and mass production in architecture have miserably failed in prefabricated housing projects, and therefore the only reasonable opportunity exists in building components and systems, which architects often utilize based on what the building product market develop, test, and put forth for them to use. The question is why architects are not active in designing building products and only depends on the manufacturing industry for products?
A New (Old) Paradigm on Metal Fabrication between the Automobile and the Building Industries
ACSA 107 Annual Meeting Proceedings, 2019
This paper provides a serious attempt to build a compelling case, arguing for a new materialism paradigm shift based on structuring a synergistic workflow between the automobile and the building industries. Although the transfer of technology between the two industries has seen an unprecedented increase in the last ten years primarily in robotics technologies and digital fabrication methods, the very basic fundamental aspects of materials supply-chain, fabrication processes, and waste-flow optimization have been overlooked by the design community. The story of making the stamped-aluminum skin of the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) building in Pittsburgh (the site of the Material Frontier call discourse) reveals a profound similar synergy between the Pullman company and the building design. The emerging opportunities from such a cross disciplined engagement in materials investigations allows for an informative design process that influences the fabrication territories of both industries. As such, this paper introduces a new methodology in transforming the consistent sized waste-flow of metals from the automobile industry to the building industry addressing an untapped opportunity in design within a time-sensitive circular economy paradigm. The paper presents a thorough review of the ALCOA building design and fabrication processes then introduce a speculative built case study illustrating the conversion from the conceptual to the applied through a series of tactile exterminations.
Finding Perfection in Imperfection: A Case Study of Adding Value by Design in Circular Economy
ARCC Conference Repository, 2018
The United States' manufacturing industry generates approximately 7.6 billion tons of non-hazardous solid waste each year, a significant portion of which is either recyclable or reusable. Emerging ecosystem concepts such as cradle-to-cradle, design for disassembly, sustainable manufacturing, and most recently circular economy, are promoting the reusing or recycling of non-hazardous industrial waste. Empirical evidence suggests that there are significant economic, environmental, and social benefits to reusing industrial waste rather than recycling it. This paper presents, discusses and synthesis five speculative case studies in designing exterior building skins using standard automobile stamping by-products. The goal of the design experiment was to transform the linear approach in making building components, particularly, exterior metal skins and cladding systems, to a closed-loop approach, which ensures multi-dimensional economic, social, and environmental benefits. The results of the study are expected to aid in the reduction of energy used for extracting new materials and change the focus of the current waste management practices in the manufacturing industry from conventional recycling to creative reuse. The imperfection of the manufacturing industrial waste despite optimization measures, and the aging of zinc (patina) can both be transformed into novel unconventional architectural products.
The European Commission has introduced a whole range of policies and initiatives to promote the product eco-innovation and the environmental impacts reductions. One of the key topic for the reduction of the environmental impacts is the waste recycling and reuse (turning waste into useful resources). A teamwork of Politecnico di Milano has developed a research work, still ongoing and continuously updated, called " The usefulness of the useless. Cross-sectorial evaluation of waste in construction " which regards the possible reuse of pre-consumer scrapes/waste, deriving from various sectors, as secondary raw materials for the supply chains of the building sector. The goals of research work are the identification of the chains with high production of pre-consumer waste and scraps, the classification of these wastes by typology, the definition of scenarios for the reuse/valorization of the identified waste and the improvement of the environmental profile of products through an integration of recycled content. The research starts from the study of the most significant supply chains inside various sectors, analyzing the input/output and defining typologies and characteristics of waste/scrapes. To simplify the identification of recycling scenarios, the supply chains and related typologies of scraps have been classified according to a typical Italian filing system code. Then the data have been collected in a matrix used to identify feasible strategies and scenarios for the valorization of waste (this represent the first result of the work). The same matrix is also useful for public and private stakeholders for pursuing strategies aiming to the generation of positive externalities, at local and at global level. The next step is the proposal of new products deriving from the waste/scraps collected during the first phase.
Beyond Recycling: Design for Disassembly, Reuse, and Circular Economy in the Built Environment
2018
Today, we use resources faster than they can be replaced. Construction consumes more resources than any other industry and has one of the largest waste streams. Resource consumption and waste generation are expected to grow as the global population increases. The circular economy (CE) is based on the concept of a closed-loop cycle (CLC) and proposes a solution that, in theory, can eliminate the environmental impacts caused by construction and demolition (C&D) waste and increase the efficiency of resources' use. In a CLC, building materials are reused, remanufactured, recycled, and reintegrated into other buildings (or into other sectors) without creating any waste. Designing out waste is the core principle of the CE. Design for disassembly or design for deconstruction (DfD) is the practice of planning the future deconstruction of a building and the reuse of its materials. Concepts like DfD, CE, and product-service systems (PSS) can work together to promote CLC in the built environment. PSS are business models based on stewardship instead of ownership. CE combines DfD, PSS, materials' durability, and materials' reuse in multiple life cycles to promote a low-carbon, regenerative economy. CE prioritizes reuse over recycling. Dealing with resource scarcity demands us to think beyond the incremental changes from recycling waste; it demands an urgent, systemic, and radical change in the way we design, build, and procure construction materials. This dissertation aims to answer three research questions: 1) How can researchers estimate the environmental benefits of reusing building components, 2) What variables are susceptible to affect the environmental impact assessment of reuse, and 3) What are the barriers and opportunities for DfD and materials' reuse in the current design practice in the United States. The first part of this study investigated how different life cycle assessment (LCA) methods (i.e., hybrid LCA and process-based LCA), assumptions (e.g., reuse rates, transportation ix Aluminum Sheet .
Towards re-usingmaterial resources of the city
2020
If we strive for a de-carbonized future, we need to think of buildings within a city as resources that can be re-used rather than being disposed of. Together with considerations on refurbishment options and future building materials, this gives a decision field for stakeholders which depends on the current ``building stock'' the set of pre-existing buildings which are characterized e.g. by building period, location and material composition. Changes in that context are hard to argue for since (1.) some depend on statistics, other (2.) on the concrete neighborhood and thus the space in which buildings are embedded, yet again others on (3.) future extrapolations again dealing with both of the aforementioned environments. To date, there exists no tool that can handle this back-and-forth between different abstraction levels and horizons in time; nor is it possible to pursue such an endeavor without a proper framework. Which is why the authors of this paper are aiming to provide o...
A Methodology to Qualitatively Select Upcycled Building Materials from Urban and Industrial Waste
The growing concern about climate change and the recognition of the planet’s limits led society to look for alternatives that promote the balance between the natural and the built environment. The circular economy emerges as an alternative to the linear economic model, inspired by natural metabolisms, by circulating resources in continuous loops, where their intrinsic value is maintained and improved. This research proposes a closed-loop strategy in the built environment by studying innovative constructive solutions that aim to find use, value, and inspiration in what is considered waste. A literature review is conducted on the circular design strategies, re-use and recycle typologies, and waste transformation processes. Then, the development of a methodology for qualitative evaluation and selection of re-used and upcycled construction materials from post-consumer waste and by-products is presented and then applied to thirty-five cases of constructive solutions from plastic, wood, p...
Use of Waste Building Materials in Architecture and Urban Planning—A Review of Selected Examples
Sustainability
Modern environmental protection standards have a direct impact on the construction and shaping of public space. Designers are increasingly reaching for materials produced via recycling technologies. Waste materials are more readily adopted and used in urban planning and architecture. Current projects in this area are being increasingly designed to meet the requirements of the circular economy, which is facilitated by the reuse of once-used components. The aim of the study is to review research papers in the Scopus database (bibliometric analysis) and other selected materials applied in construction, which are recycled and used again in various ways in the construction of subsequent buildings. The results show various application possibilities of recycled materials in construction. The study draws attention to the fact that the use of recycled materials in modern construction is becoming more and more effective, which may contribute to increasing the share of the circular economy in ...