Remanufacturing as a strategy for a circular built environment

Abstract

The building industry is material intensive and is responsible for approximately 40% of the total waste generated across the European Union. It operates on a ‘take-make-dispose’ model due to which key issues such as resource scarcity, waste generation, and environmental pressure occur. The circular economy has been attributed to the need to utilize waste flows more effectively, thereby reducing raw material demand. By 2050, the Dutch Government aims to transition to Circular Economy and organize the building industry in a way to ensure sustainable construction by use, reuse, maintenance and dismantling of objects.

Remanufacturing is a strategy of the circular economy that supports this approach. It is a process of returning a used product to its original performance with a warranty that is equivalent to or better than that of newly manufactured product. It is an important component of resource efficient manufacturing as it reduces the dependency on virgin materials.Through research, it was observed that the principles of circular economy are well established theoretically but lack guidelines that make them applicable in practice. Therefore, the thesis focuses to find out “how” remanufacturing of building products be implemented as a strategy to accelerate the progress towards a circular built environment.
The project develops a remanufacturing canvas and list of criteria through literature study of successful examples of remanufacturing such as Xerox, Caterpillar, Canon, Philips MRI Systems and Davies Office furniture. Further the proposed canvas is validated through a case study of the building De Satelliet of DNB complex to investigate their remanufacturing potential of EoL façade elements which were disassembled with an intention of giving a second life.

The study includes crafting guidelines for the remanufacturing of EoL façade elements. Remanufacturing as a strategy was evaluated through assessments based on Cost, Embodied energy, and thermal performance of the façade elements. The results from the assessments were in favour of remanufacturing. However, it was concluded that while remanufacturing depicts the power of smaller loop and follows all the principles of circular economy, it is important to note that remanufacturing process shifts a large amount of responsibility from a customer to the manufacturer. There is always a risk of creating more impact than virgin production and hence decisions must be supported through results from calculations of embodied carbon and LCA.