SURVEYING THE SECTOR
When a building is demolished – or rather dismantled – incorporating the used steel , concrete and other building parts into a new construction project can help to minimise overall carbon impact . It also means fewer raw materials need to be extracted .
But just how practical is this ? What changes would be needed at the industry level to scale such initiatives ? How can structural engineers and BIM software contribute to the process ? These are some of the questions that a team from global engineering consultancy AFRY set out to answer during a competition exploring material re-use .
The Finnish city of Espoo – one of the three cities that make up the Helsinki capital region – wanted to explore reuse ideas for a space called Keran Hallit . Constructed in the 1960s , the former logistics centre had been converted into a mixeduse space for startups , sports facilities and cafés in an area covering thousands of square metres . After serving in that capacity , the building is now slated for demolition , as the area is zoned for residential housing . The competition was aimed at bringing in ideas for sustainable and scalable re-use of the materials Keran Hallit is built from .
“ We took on the project to try and establish some practices that could be more widely used .,” says AFRY Finland ’ s Head of Sustainable Development , Arto Toorikka . “ Solving global problems is at the core of our business . We think it ’ s really important to try and find new solutions for this issue .”
BIM objects in an open digital inventory
The team from AFRY designed a nine-stage circular process for re-using Keran Hallit ’ s steel beams , concrete and other materials . The City of Espoo selected the proposal as one of three winners that were then invited to submit a proof of concept .
AFRY ’ s process begins with a survey of the structures slated for demolition to assess possibilities for material re-use in a broad sense . In stage two the salvageable materials are identified , and in stage three the objects are modelled with Building Information Technology ( BIM ) into a digital inventory .
“ You first have to classify the building parts that can be reused . We concentrated on beams , columns and slabs , using point-cloud scanning
We took on the project to try and establish some practices that could be more widely used .
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