Development of an Eco-Design Tool for a Circular Approach to Building Renovation Projects

Abstract

Considering the construction sector’s impact on the environment, it is necessary amongst other measures to change the way in which new construction or renovation projects of buildings are designed and how solutions are proposed and integrated. Nowadays, an effort is being made by designers to implement more sustainable and circular design in buildings, but because of the lack of tools that can provide designers with knowledge about the impacts of the solutions to be chosen, the sustainability factor does not enter in the decision-making process as a key factor. In this sense, the development of an eco-design tool and procedure for the decision-making process will allow designers to integrate into the design phase a circular design methodology and, in a practical way, will also promote sustainability and circularity concepts as a decision factor in the construction of buildings. The present work introduces an eco-design tool that was developed to integrate circularity and sustainability information into building-renovation projects. This tool enables the evaluation and comparison of solutions based on information provided by Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) or other LCA-based calculations as well as life cycle costing information, through the generation of radar graphics that simplify the overall analysis at the decision moment. The tool was tested in a simple case study of a building renovation process and allowed designers to understand the environmental and economic impacts that each competing solution carries, either related to the materials removed from the building or to the materials coming into the buildings being renovated. In this test application, the eco-design tool proved to be able to gather quantitative information regarding environmental and economic impacts, facilitating designers to access knowledge on the different solutions impacts and help them to make a design choice based on sustainability and circularity considerations.

Sustainable Mitigation Strategies for Urban Heat Island Effects in Urban Areas

“…Changing the characteristics of rooftops can help alleviate some of these issues. The addition of vegetation and soil to unused rooftop spaces is typically seen as a good method for making buildings more environmentally friendly [27]. Hence, green roofs are just rooftops that have had vegetation transplanted onto a growing medium.…”

Towards Sustainable Construction: A Systematic Review of Circular Economy Strategies and Ecodesign in the Built Environment

“…It provides the outputs of land-use change and the related GHG emissions considering gross domestic product (GDP), population, and carbon price path. Bourgeois et al [76] introduced an ecodesign tool that facilitates the integration of circularity and sustainability of building renovation projects, enabling the evaluation of solutions using Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), LCAbased calculations, and life cycle cost information.…”

“…Also, investigate the hotspots of a process and develop solutions to reduce environmental impacts. [28,34,[38][39][40][41][42]45,48,51,58,70,71,76,79,85,87,88,91,93,[96][97][98][99] Use of renewable energy and decarbonization of supply chain Design to use renewable energy, sources are regenerated or naturally replenished (biomass, geothermal, solar, hydro, wind, and biofuels), to generate electric power, heating, cooking, water heating, and as fuel for transport. [28,52,68,73,74,91,93] Analyzing the relationship between the year and the strategy, as shown in Figure 7, the most cited strategies between 2020 and 2022 are "Reuse of buildings and materials", "Studying alternatives", "Design for disassembly", "Design for flexibility and adaptability", "Design for life extension", "Design for reuse", and "Recycling".…”