Energy-oriented deconstruction and recovery planning

The reduction of waste through the establishment of closed-loop material flows has an important role in creating a more sustainable built environment. Especially in deconstruction projects, participants could take advantage of the application of waste management and recovery strategies while adhering to the principle of 'sustainable construction'. The opportunity for materials recovery depends on the type of deconstruction technique applied at a building's end-of-life. An integrated deconstruction-recovery planning approach for deconstruction projects is developed to include ecological as well as economic benefits. This planning approach is an extension of the multi-mode resource-constrained project-scheduling problem (MMRCPSP) from operations research. Although the general MMRCPSP considers time- and resource-resource trade-offs, the proposed extension incorporates energy-time-resource trade-offs. The energy-time-resource trade-offs reflect the realization of energy savings or costs over the life cycle of a building. Based on a life cycle energy analysis, recovery options can be selected for deconstructed components and materials dependent on the chosen deconstruction techniques (e.g. demolition, selective deconstruction, manual deconstruction, and deconstruction using various resources).