A new tool shows the raw materials incorporated into buildings. This makes recycling, reuse and the planning of building material flows easier.
Circular-economy thinking is becoming increasingly important in the construction sector. This helps reduce the consumption of raw materials and emissions, and can provide a well-thought-out reuse and recycling scheme to cut costs. In order to assess the potential resources within the existing building stock, the Institute of Architectural Technology at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) has developed a tool called Urban Mining Screener in collaboration with its project partner, Revitalyze. This enables raw materials and building elements such as concrete, bricks and timber to be identified in existing buildings for the Austrian building stock at the moment.
Geodata linked to archetypes
“Knowing what resources are already incorporated into buildings is extremely valuable,” says project manager Matthias Lang-Raudaschl from the Institute of Architectural Technology at TU Graz. “Information about future materials available in a region could help demolition contractors better estimate their costs and logistics, allow building materials manufacturers to better plan recycled concrete production, and enable property developers to reuse components such as timber beams and windows.”
The methodological basis of the project is a combination of publicly available geodata and what are known as building archetypes. To perform the calculation, a specially developed algorithm uses three-dimensional data from OpenStreetMap to determine a building’s floor area, perimeter and height. The Urban Mining Screener links this data to one of 154 building archetypes developed by the Working Group for Sustainable Construction at the Institute of Structural Design at TU Graz. Specific parameters such as year of construction, materials used and energy efficiency class are recorded for these archetypes. These values are expanded by three levels to include any refurbishment work carried out in order to account for changes compared with the original condition.
A potential alternative to time-consuming measuring methods
Using this database, users can obtain an estimate of the materials used simply by entering an address in the tool’s input form. A test carried out on a real building has shown that the assessment is quite accurate, particularly in the case of mineral building materials. For materials such as plastic or complex metal structures such as handrails, the results were not yet as accurate, as these have not yet been modelled using archetypes. The team would like to make improvements in that area.
“Even though there are still a few challenges to overcome, the Urban Mining Screener has the potential to become a quick alternative to time-consuming survey methods,” says Matthias Lang-Raudaschl. “Particularly at city or regional level, the tool can display resources much more quickly. At this level, the accuracy of the estimates would probably be even higher than for individual buildings. This data could be used to simulate future flows of building materials and support the circular economy with accurate forecasts. This allows the building stock to be viewed systematically as a valuable reservoir of resources.”
The Urban Mining Screener files are publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/revitalyze/urban-mining-screener