Informazione materiale: strumenti per l’implementazione dello urban mining in edilizia = Material information: tools for the urban mining implementation in the building sector

The contribution deals with the implementation of circular economy practices in the construction field, examining the strategies that allow the recovery of material resources stored in existing buildings once they reach their end of life. Considering the constantly growing amount of embodied carbon in the products and materials embedded in the contemporary building stock, it appears essential to promote decarbonization by encouraging the recovery of building components through their remanufacturing and reuse. The paper investigates the possible role that some recent tools, developed to evaluate the material flows deriving from Construction and Demolition activities, can play in supporting the preservation of resources through urban mining processes. The examined tools were produced within three different recent guidelines: the “Guidelines for the waste audits before demolition and renovation works of buildings” by the European Commission (2018), the “UNI Reference Practice” (2020), and “A guide for identifying the reuse potential of construction products” (2020) developed through a bottom-up approach in the Interreg NWE FCRBE project. The investigation examines how these tools fit into the building demolition process, depicting the most considered aspects of the overall workflow. In the second place, it evaluates their potential interaction with urban mining strategies, as instruments capable to “inform” the subsequent design and construction processes with a view to maximizing the reuse and remanufacturing of the recovered material resources. The results highlight the benefits of merging the top-down and bottom-up approaches as a means to enhance more efficient circular strategy in the built environment management. This would allow combining the selective demolition broader framework with the reclamation strategies fostered by the tools developed by the practitioners, blending environmental management and design processes together.