A Data-Driven Approach to Assess the Risk of Encountering Hazardous Materials in the Building Stock Based on Environmental Inventories

Abstract

The presence of hazardous materials hinders the circular economy in construction and demolition waste management. However, traditional environmental investigations are costly and time-consuming, and thus lead to limited adoption. To deal with these challenges, the study investigated the possibility of employing registered records as input data to achieve in situ hazardous building materials management at a large scale. Through characterizing the eligible building groups in question, the risk of unexpected cost and delay due to acute abatement could be mitigated. Merging the national building registers and the environmental inventory from renovated and demolished buildings in the City of Gothenburg, a training dataset was created for data validation and statistical operations. Four types of inventories were evaluated to identify the building groups with adequate data size and data quality. The observations’ representativeness was described by plotting the distribution of building features between the Gothenburg dataset and the training dataset. Evaluating the missing data and the positive detection rates affirmed that reports and protocols could locate hazardous materials in the building stock. The asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-containing materials with high positive detection rates were highlighted and discussed. Moreover, the potential inventory types and building groups for future machine learning prediction were delineated through the cross-validation matrix. The novel study contributes to the method development for assessing the risk of residual hazardous materials in buildings.

Causes of Damages in Swedish Buildings

“…The 1105 registered damages were categorized according to the selected parameters for cause of damage. In addition, some cross-comparisons of the selected parameters were done similar but simpler than the more complex analysis that Wu et al (2021) did for PCB and asbestos. The results include all registered damages, failures and functional defects in the database.…”

Circular Economy and Buildings as Material Banks in Mitigation of Environmental Impacts from Construction and Demolition Waste

“…Furthermore, attention must be paid to the carbon incorporated in the processing and transportation of the material for reuse, as well as the source of data for LCA, as these are factors that directly impact the positive result of carbon savings [66]. Regarding the risk of the existence of dangerous materials in the built stock, there are impacts from the point of view of the threat of contamination due to the use in older constructions of materials that are now prohibited, such as asbestos, in addition to the costs necessary for their safe removal [79].…”

“…For countries that already have a robust methodology for environmental audits of existing buildings, the methodology proposed by Wu et al (2021) [79] can be applied as a way to systematize and validate a limited set of environmental inventory data. These can be compared to the existing stock of buildings to predict waste materials in those buildings.…”

Circular Economy and Buildings as Material Banks in Mitigation of Environmental Impacts from Construction and Demolition Waste

“…Furthermore, attention must be paid to the carbon incorporated in the processing and transportation of the material for reuse, as well as the source of data for LCA, as these are factors that directly impact the positive result of carbon savings [55]. Regarding the risk of the existence of dangerous materials in the built stock, there are impacts from the point of view of the threat of contamination due to the use in older constructions of materials that are now prohibited, such as asbestos, in addition to the costs necessary for their safe removal [69].…”