Life cycle assessment of building demolition waste based on building information modeling

Sustainable building-demolition-waste management has become an important practice. Normally, three different methods of disposing of demolition waste should be considered: landfill, reuse, and recycling. The use of traditional documentation techniques for assessing the environmental impact of different disposal methods during the end-of-life (EOL) stage results in hundreds of detailed instruction sheets that need to be stored. In this study, a life-cycle assessment (LCA) framework is proposed for the evaluation and comparison of the environmental impacts of the three disposal strategies mentioned above in terms of factors such as the extraction of resources, loss of biodiversity, and effect on human health by using the information obtained with typical building information modeling (BIM). In the LCA framework, four environmental-impact-allocation types (namely, no, equal, mass, and economic allocations) are used to calculate the final impacts of the products to be shared by more than one product system. The results reveal that a particular disposal strategy should be investigated by considering an entire building to assess the effective reuse/recycling potential. In addition, a BIM-based plug-in (BIM-EF) is developed for the automatic appraisal of the environmental impact of buildings at the EOL stage by using Revit Add-in Manager. Two data libraries (the engineering quantity data library and environmental impact factor library) are created, and a coding system is established to connect the information stored in the BIM model and the two data libraries. Finally, the results of a case study are presented to illustrate the potential applications of the proposed method.