BRE-X Emissions Database for End-of-Life Scenarios of Selective Building Construction Materials to Enable Circular Economy in Construction

Abstract

In the United States, construction and demolition debris predominately end up in landfills with minimal end-of-life Re-X (recover, recycle, reuse, etc.) scenarios, resulting in large environmental impacts and lost opportunities for material recovery. Except for concrete and metals, which seem to have a few well-defined end-of-life pathways, there seems to be a lack of well-documented end-of-life scenarios for other construction materials, let alone their emissions data. Hence, there is a need for documented end-of-life Re-X scenarios and end-of-life data of more building materials to motivate widespread use of Re-X strategies in building design. This paper outlines the efforts of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Carbon Leadership Forum, Building Transparency, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to (a) create an open-access BRE-X (Building Re-X) end-of-life emissions database consisting of greenhouse gas emissions data associated with various end-of-life scenarios for a select list of high-impact building construction materials, and (b) integrate the BRE-X end-of-life emissions database with CAD/BIM/LCA tools for evaluating various end-of-life scenarios. The paper also presents a few existing life cycle inventory databases that contain sparse amounts of end-of-life data for a few construction materials and their limitations in terms of scaling and data consolidation. Finally, a sample of how the collected data can be ingested into whole-building LCA tools using open data formats and a public access link to the BRE-X end-of-life emissions database is also included.