We’ve got to try and avoid bad practices -and report them.
A building’s impact starts before the building exists and carries on past the end of its useful life, as part of the circular economy.We can demonstrate that early sustainable impact can have an exponentially positive impact on carbon savings and the creation of our sustainable future.. Second-hand, locally sourced materials can influence design.
This might be re-using existing raised flooring, using demolition crush material for a piling mat, or re-using existing steel columns.A pre-demolition audit of an existing building highlights reusable and recyclable materials.Where materials can be reused, these should be considered for reuse on the same or a local site, thereby reducing material miles and facilitating a more sustainable construction process.
Although the circular economy market is in its infancy, by considering material reuse during the earliest design stages we can help build that marketplace.In time, this market will help to further reduce material costs..
Following through the circular economy idea to the end of a building’s life, simple design choices allow new materials to be reused at that stage.
Using reversable joints for steelwork connections so that beams and columns can be disassembled in their primary form, allows them to be re-used rather than be melted down and recycled as a raw material.The National Digital Twin aims to create a translation mechanism called the Information Management Framework.
This won’t be a massive data store sitting in the cloud.Instead, it’s a federated system allowing different parties to find and use data from other sources, and to check whether they’re allowed to do so..
However, certain problems remain.The first is that someone might not be sure whether the data they’re looking for even exists, and the second involves the requirements under which the data was gathered.