Environmental impact minimization of reticular structures made of reused and new elements through Life Cycle Assessment and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

An important share of building environmental impacts is embodied in load-bearing structures because of their large material mass and energy-intensive fabrication process. To reduce substantially material consumption and waste caused by the construction industry, structures can be designed and built with reused elements. Structural element reuse involves: element sourcing and deconstruction, reconditioning and transport. As these processes also generate environmental impacts, reuse might not always be preferred over new construction. This paper presents a method to design reticular structures with minimal environmental impact made from reused and new elements. The formulation given in this paper is based on a combination of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and discrete structural optimization. The LCA carried out in this work accounts for impacts generated from sourcing reclaimed elements to the assembly of the structure. Structural optimization is subject to stress constraints on element capacity and deflection limits for serviceability. Typical loading scenarios are considered. The method is applied to the design of three single-span steel trusses of different topology subject to 100 simulated stocks of reusable elements that have varying cross-sections and lengths. Benchmarks against minimum-weight solutions made solely from recycled steel show that this method produces structures with up to 56% lower environmental impact. Depending on stock availability, the lowest environmental impact is achieved through a combination of reused and new elements.

Inventory constrained design of a timber funicular structure

“…There are several existing methods proposed to quantify the efficacy of resource recovery in inventory-constrained design processes. A comprehensive life-cycle cost measure can consider material production, fabrication and waste disposal processes, but requires a cost estimation for material processing and waste disposal [16]. A simplified method proposed in [10,17] used an offcut-ratio measure which considers only the total mass of the overall structure and generated waste (unused material).…”

Nurturing Consumers‘ Green Purchase Intention on Natural Dyes Batik During Craft Shopping Tour in the Batik City of Pekalongan Indonesia

“…High level of consumption on non-environmentally friendly products globally have proliferate environmental problems which resulted as pollution in various elements of life (Afrinaldy et al, 2017) such as; water, air (Lou et al, 2017) land, and waste (De Aquim at al., 2019). Thus, the novel green consumption trend among community encourages every member to understand and alter their conventional consumption patterns in their purchase intentions in pursuing environmental sustainability (Ahmad at al., 2020;Brutting et al, 2020;De Aquim et al, 2019;Prakash et al, 2019;Jaiswal and Kant, 2018;Nie et al, 2018). Research on green products' consumer purchase intentions has been widely conducted (Chairy, 2012;Joshi and Zillur, 2015;Mobrezi and Khoshtinat, 2016;Bashir et al, 2019;Agmeka et al, 2019).…”

Decision Framework to Balance Environmental, Technical, Logistical, and Economic Criteria When Designing Structures With Reused Components

“…As structural components contribute a significant share of the embodied carbon of buildings (Cole and Kernan, 1996;Kaethner and Burridge, 2012;Häkkinen et al, 2015;De Wolf et al, 2020b), this work focuses on the reuse of structural components which avoids new component production, energy-intensive recycling processes, possible short-term landfilling and hence usually lowers environmental impacts (Pongiglione and Calderini, 2014;Cooper and Gutowski, 2017;Gorgolewski, 2017;Brütting et al, 2020b). Different to conventional structural design, designing structures with reused components implies that the design is strongly influenced by a limited stock of reclaimed structural components (Gorgolewski, 2008) alongside additional challenges specific to the "reuse" supply chain: reconditioning; testing; selective deconstruction (Figure 1).…”

“…Regarding design tools, structural optimization is commonly employed in research and practice to obtain optimal designs subject to typical boundary conditions and loads (Ohsaki, 2016;Lagaros, 2018). Brütting et al (2019Brütting et al ( , 2020b presented a discrete structural optimization method to design reticular structures (e.g., trusses and frames) with reused and new components and subject to ultimate and serviceability limit state constraints. The optimization method considers the availability and mechanical properties of reclaimed structural components.…”

“…As a result, two similar products that are obtained through different processes, here the "reuse" and "new" routes, have different environmental impacts. LCA has been for example applied to steel reuse by Yeung et al (2017) and combined with structural optimization for steel structures in works by Brütting et al (2018Brütting et al ( , 2019Brütting et al ( , 2020b.…”