International Industrial Ecology Day 2021

Advanced computational tools like building information modeling (BIM) have great potential for facilitating environmental life cycle evaluation of buildings, their construction and for supporting circular material flows from new and end-of-life (EOL) buildings. Here we introduce a method and case study that combines BIM and MFA to define a material passport for a LEED-rated commercial building in Israel. The building was designed using “BIM in the big room”, a product development technique in which designers of different sub-systems are brought together to promote communication, collaboration and short-cycle problem solving. For this finished building, BIM in the big room involved architects and structural, mechanical and electrical engineers collaborating together to optimize the design of the building. Material passports use BIM to classify and quantify building objects by their material constituents to assess their potential for recycling at the building’s demolition stage. The material passport can be combined with life cycle inventory data to evaluate the environmental impacts of the embodied material in the building and also guide best practices for deconstruction. The BIM analysis shows a high volume of concrete (55,000 m3) and glass curtain walls (45,000 m2). The concrete can be recovered from the structural frame if dismantled. The glass curtain walls may also be recovered for reuse in other projects or recycled into new glass products. Current practice in Israel recovers little value from retired concrete, the most common case being that the concrete is crushed and used as a base course and filling material. However, further development of material passport concepts with lean construction methods can identify better ways of preserving material quality during deconstruction, which can render higher quality secondary materials from EOL buildings. We discuss the role that lean construction can play in improving material recovery from the deconstructed buildings.