Clean construction and demolition waste material cycles through optimised pre-demolition waste audit documentation: A review on building material assessment tools

Abstract

Waste from the construction sector poses huge challenges for sustainable waste management. This is not only due to the vast amount of waste produced in construction and demolition activities, but also due to pollutants potentially contained in these products. Subject to these conditions, waste management must ensure recovery of as many resources as possible, while making sure to keep material loops clean. This demanding task requires more knowledge about the existing building stock and an adaptation of current demolition processes. Innovative technologies, such as Building Information Modelling, or modern frameworks, such as Geographic Information Systems, offer a high potential to synoptically provide stock material information for future demolition activities for individual objects to be deconstructed as well as for whole cities as a basis for managing the anthropogenic stock and potential urban mining. Suitable methods of data collection allow for acquiring the desired input for the generation of building stock models enriched with demolition-related information. With the latter, selective deconstruction strategies as well as appropriate waste stream routing agendas can be planned and executed, thereby securing safety at work during the demolition process itself and a waste stream routing according to the waste hierarchy. This review article gives an overview of currently deployed building material assessment tools (data capture and visualisation), both a prerequisite for improved information on materials and geometry (and thereby mass/volume). In addition, this article describes workflows employable for the purpose of urban mining in end-of-life buildings, of which one holistic approach will be described in depth.