SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Have building-size legos finally arrived?
The Institute for Civil Engineering and Environment (INCEEN) at the University of Luxembourg have signed a "memorandum of understanding" with the Suisse Federal Laboratories of Materials Science and Technology (Empa) of the domain of ETH Zürich to collaborate on research on energy efficiency in the construction sector.
As the building sector is generating a large amount of CO2 emissions, resource consumption and waste production, new eco-construction approaches are needed. Therefore, the first collaboration project entitled "Eco-Construction for Sustainable Development" (ECON4SD) will focus on the development of novel components and design models for resource and energy efficient buildings based on the construction materials concrete, steel and timber.
ECON4SD will bring together researchers from different civil engineering fields and architecture at the University of Luxembourg and the Empa Zürich, as well as from universities abroad in cooperation with partners from industry and consultancies in Luxembourg. One vision of the project is to develop building components that can be re-used after a building has reached the end of its life cycle and is disassembled. "The ECON4SD aims to turn buildings into materials and components banks and will allow producers of structural elements to come to a different business model. That would consist in loaning materials or components to customers and take them back after use in a particular building, in order to resell them directly, recondition or recycle them," commented professor Danièle Waldmann of the University of Luxembourg. "Thereby, the project paves the way for a future CE material or component passport comparable to the already existing energy passport."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @07:57PM
Wood is perfectly find to reuse, especially if it doesn't have a bunch of holes in it from nails/screws. Even then there are certain permanent fillers you can use which are 'as strong or stronger' than the original wood, ensuring that the renailed boards are just as good as new, assuming no damage.
Wood lasts a long time if not damaged by the elements or neglect, and even in many condemned houses most of the structural materials would still be good. Usually what makes a place uninhabitable is water damage, mold, or unrepaired structural damage at a point in the house where the weight distribution could cause a catastrophic collapse. Most of the reason for materials going to the dump is simple labor cost. Nobody wants to take the time to pull the nails out of sheetrock and then wall beams to recover the materials used in a house. It is cheaper to just bulldoze the whole place. I heard of such happening with a 100 year old warehouse out near where the big California fire just happened. The building in question was ALL REDWOOD. The owner of the building chose to have it demolished rather than having it disassembled so that the redwood could be recovered and resold, despite dozens of people willing to pay to get it, and the beam sizes being IMPOSSIBLE to find today thanks to over lumbering of old growth redwoods leading to the current conservation restrictions on them today.