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23 pages, 5814 KiB

Open AccessEditor’s ChoiceArticle

Timber Buildings Deconstruction as a Design Solution toward Near Zero CO2e Emissions

by Giacomo Di Ruocco, Roberta Melella and Laura Sabatano

Buildings 2023, 13(1), 157; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings13010157 - 7 Jan 2023

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3527

The overall reduction in the environmental impacts of the construction industry is a complex process that requires methodological and applicative studies on the evaluation of the sustainability of the life cycle, related to both individual product and of the building system as a whole. In this context, with reference to the end-of-life phase of the building, the management of the disassembly and selective demolition plan of the building, allowing the reuse or recycling of the materials as well as of the building components and prefabricated elements used is fundamental. This research aimed to develop a methodology, applied to timber building systems, to mitigate CO2e emissions during the decommissioning and disposal of the building. The quantitative model developed considers the rates of the CO2e emissions involved in C (end-of-life) and D (benefits and loads beyond the system boundary) phases of building sustainability assessment. The model was applied to two wooden buildings: one with an XLAM structure and another one with a framed structure. In both cases, from the perspective of reusing the wood components for a subsequent life cycle, C and D phases of the process achieved an overall negative CO2e emission rate thanks to the offsetting from the carbon storage property of wood. This research has thus demonstrated the possibility of making the wood construction process circular through a zero-emission approach. Full article

(This article belongs to the Collection Low-Carbon Buildings and Urban Energy Systems)

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12 pages, 423 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Sustainable Ship Loading Planning for Prefabricated Products in the Construction Industry

by Wen Yi, Robyn Phipps and Hans Wang

Sustainability 2020, 12(21), 8905; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12218905 - 27 Oct 2020

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3099

Abstract

This paper focuses on sustainable transportation of prefab products from factories to construction sites by ship. Since the transportation cost for all the prefab products of a construction site is mainly dependent on the number of cargo holds used on ships, a loading plan for prefab products that minimizes the number of holds required is highly desirable. This paper is therefore devoted to the development of an optimal loading plan that decides which prefab products are loaded into each cargo hold and how to pack these prefab products into the holds so that as few holds as possible are used. We formulate the problem as a large-scale integer optimization model whose objective function is to minimize the total number of cargo holds used and whose constraints represent the cargo hold capacity limits. We develop a heuristic to solve the problem and obtain a high-quality solution. We have tested the model and algorithm on a case study that includes 20 prefab products. We find that different cargo holds carry prefab products that have quite different densities. Moreover, the orientations of many prefab products are different from their default orientations. The results demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model and algorithm. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Operations and Management for Sustainable and Green Maritime Transportation)

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