Understanding transportation energy and technical metabolism of construction waste recycling

Wai K. Chong and Christopher Hermreck

Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 2010, vol. 54, issue 9, 579-590

Abstract: Energy and resource efficiencies are both critical to achieve building design and construction sustainability. Embodied energy is a measure of the energy required to produce, install, and maintain materials, while technical metabolism enhances building design recyclability. Nearly all types of materials can be recycled. However, the technical metabolism of the materials depends on the existence of a market for these recycled materials, the regional recycling capacities, the total energy used to recycle, and the knowledge of the workers and designers about material recycling on a construction project. Although the concepts of embodied energy and technical metabolism have been around for many years, the concepts have not been extensively applied to construction projects. This research examines the transportation energy use for recycling construction wastes and the actual rate of recycling of these projects. The study concluded that the recyclability of construction wastes and the energy required for transporting the wastes are affected by regional variables, such as the distances between project sites and recycling facilities; social variables, such as regional purchasing habits; and design variables, such as the ease of deconstruction and recycling of construction materials. These variables affect the transportation need of shipping the wastes for recycling, and the percentage of materials that can be “metabolized.” These variables have to be developed into models that would help designers produce better estimates of the embodied energy of recycling and the recyclability of construction materials.

Keywords: Embodied energy; Transportation; Construction waste; Recycling; Technical metabolism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344909002390
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:recore:v:54:y:2010:i:9:p:579-590

DOI: 10.1016/j.resconrec.2009.10.015

Access Statistics for this article

Resources, Conservation & Recycling is currently edited by Ming Xu

More articles in Resources, Conservation & Recycling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kai Meng ().