Publications / 2014 Proceedings of the 31st ISARC, Sydney, Australia

Estimating the Costs, Energy Use and Carbon Emissions of Concrete Recycling Using Building Information Modelling

A. Akbarnezhad, Z.S. Moussavi Nadoushani
Pages 385-392 (2014 Proceedings of the 31st ISARC, Sydney, Australia, ISBN 978-0-646-59711-9, ISSN 2413-5844)
Abstract:

The economic and environmental benefits achievable through concrete recycling depend on many parameters including, but not limited to, travelling distances between demolished building and concrete recycling plant and/or landfills, prices of natural and recycled aggregates and the desired quality of the recycled aggregates which itself depends on a number of other parameters including the properties of parent concrete and the recycling procedure used. The overlapping effects of such parameters makes decision making about the selection of the concrete recycling strategy and appropriate level of recycling difficult. This paper presents a framework for assessment of costs, energy use and emissions incurred by adopting the concrete recycling strategy in a particular building project using the information made available by building information models. The estimated costs, energy use and emissions may be helpful in decision making about selection of the concrete recycling strategy in a particular project. An illustrative example is presented to highlight the potential benefits of the proposed method.

Keywords: Building Information Modelling, Concrete, Recycling, Cost, Carbon