Data, Stakeholders, and Environmental Assessment: A BIM-Enabled Approach to Designing-out Construction and Demolition Waste

Abstract

Construction and Demolition waste has started to become a target in the path for a more sustainable industry mainly due to massive resource consumption, land depletion and emissions. As a substantial amount of waste originates due to inadequate decision-making during design, strategies to design-out waste are required. Accurate environmental impact of, not only the whole building, but construction materials and elements are crucial to the development of these strategies, but dependent on data availability, expert knowledge and proper sharing and storage of information. Hence, this study aims to investigate the relation between data, stakeholders and environmental assessment to properly build a design-out waste framework. An in-depth data collection from literature review and stakeholders' interviews guided the development of a conceptual framework to assist designers with information related to waste production and its reduction. After that, the necessary technical specifications for its adoption through a BIM environment were analysed. Its contribution is firstly on a shift of thinking during the design phase, as the goal is to provide environmental information so designers can take into consideration the long-term consequences of waste from different strategies and solutions; and secondly in the development of a computational tool that facilitates the design-out process.