Economic and environmental assessment of deconstruction strategies using building information modeling

Choosing the most sustainable deconstruction strategy requires assessment of the effects of various contributing factors including prices and energy embodiment of the materials and components, the travelling distances, energy use and cost associated with the recycling processes, inflation rate, costs of designing the components for reuse-ability, costs of disassembly and re-assembly. Furthermore, a typical building comprises thousands of different components with various characteristics which may affect their reusability and recyclability. These lead to an enormous amount of information that needs to be stored and made available for analysis prior to and during the deconstruction stage. The present study proposes a framework for evaluating and comparing the effects of various alternative deconstruction strategies on cost, energy use and carbon footprint of construction using the information provided by a typical building information model. The results of a case study are presented to illustrate the potential applications of the proposed method.