Enhancement of the process of reusing building products
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Last Updated: 5-2022
There is a growing awareness in the housing and infrastructure sector for their large resource
footprint and its Construction Demolition Waste (CDW). The construction sector plays a crucial
role in the transition towards a more sustainable and circular economy. In a circular economy,
all loops are closed and products and materials cycle in the loops as long as possible and as
valuable as possible, leaving no waste. The supply and demand for reusable building products
in the construction sector is growing, however it was found that this process is still
unstandardised and is lacking product information. Besides, finding a suitable reusable
product for architects and contractors was found time consuming. To enhance this process of
reusing building products, this study aims at valorising the reusable product market by
standardising the inventarisation during the deconstruction process and match this data with
information from the Building Information Modelling (BIM) model of the new building in
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) code. To solve this problem, in total three application that
are working together were created. First, an inventarisation application is developed for
inventorising reusable products in the existing building stock, that does not contain a BIM
model. By using the inventarisation application, the value of the reusable products is captured
in a standardised way and will no longer be seen as CDW, but really as a reusable product that
contain a value. By using the inventarisation application a total time of 38% in comparison
with the current inventarisation process is saved. The structured data can be seen as a product
passport. Secondly, a matching application is created, for architects and contractors, which
matches products from the stock of reusable products with JSON data from BIM models by
using similarity matching. The search scope of the matching can be tightened or broadened
on each parameter during matching. Thirdly, an interactive product management dashboard
shows the possibilities of the inventoried data through the inventarisation application for the
managers of the deconstruction company. Further development of the applications, as well
as extensions and optimalizations are interesting topics for future research.