Circularity Potential Of Timber Buildings In Theory and Practice - Economic And Ecological Aspects Of The Re-use Potential

Abstract

Small scale Residential buildings based on pre-fabrication (aka system construction methods) can be found in Austria (and Central Europe) since more than a century. Advantages of these buildings include cost-efficiency due to the industrial fabrication process, rendering them to be the most affordable option for individual single-family houses. Moreover, adaptations to the buildings in an “order to assemble” process are in many cases possible and allow certain individual decisions by their future inhabitants. In Austria, the industry is characterized by small and medium-sized companies, which in part showed a high degree of innovation in planning and production of such buildings. The lifeexpectancy of such buildings stipulated by construction standards by far outnumbers today’s real usage time of such building. However, little effort has been spent in reusing components from such buildings in the past. In a shared effort, we explore different aspects of their reuse-potential. In this contribution, the ecological and economic aspects of reuse of prefabricated components from existing single-family homes are assessed. Thereby, the disassembling on the previous building site, retrofit to meet today’s requirements on site or factorybased, efforts for transport, and re-assembling of existing pre-fab components are holistically assessed. This approach is required to verify that the re-use of pre-fab components can become new business model that considerably reduces cost for end-consumers and reduces CO2-emissions in comparison to buildings made completely out of new components. We utilize typical standards for construction phases and cost-assessment as well as Life-cycle considerations for this validation of the approach.