Waste Management Bulletin (Jun 2024)
Building stock as a future supply of second-use material – A review of urban mining methods
Abstract
The building sector is a major player in the world’s contribution to climate change, partly due to its dependence on large quantities of materials. The circular economy model of material flow has been gaining attention in the past decade as it seeks to promote the use of construction, renovation, and demolition (CRD) waste as inputs for new buildings or other applications, which would result in the diversion of materials from landfills. Developing a system capable of handling such waste requires a comprehensive knowledge of the composition of the building stock materials. This information, however, is rarely available. Thus, this research is proposing a conceptual model to aid city planners when considering the existing built environment as a resource for new construction. The methodology followed by this review includes a thorough analysis of 82 articles on quantity takeoff methods in the Urban Mining (UM) and CRD Waste Management (WM) fields. These articles were analyzed by considering a framework of four layers, i.e., (i) the approach, (ii) the analysis method, (iii) the granularity, and (iv) the performance analysis. The comprehensive analysis of the literature has highlighted the fact that the existing quantity takeoff methods need to consider more in-depth attributes and that the works performed by using machine learning methods are very important in the path toward the direction of improving these methods. With this conceptual model, waste management planners can select the appropriate methodology based on the available input data, and the type of output that they are looking.
