Development of upcycling methods for post-demolition wooden building components

Project Gist

Development of upcycling methods for post-demolition wooden building components

Keywords

Up-Cycle

Background and Purpose

Sustainable construction is being sought as one means of building a circular economy, and awareness of the resource situation and material flow is becoming increasingly important in architectural studies. In addition, due to international cooperation on climate change countermeasures, interest in new wooden building technologies such as CLT (Cross Laminated Timber), which has a low global environmental impact, is increasing all over the world. The view that “the generation of demolition waste is a design flaw” demands that the materials and components that make up a product be recyclable into another usable product upon disassembly. The goal of this research is to create a method to add value by upcycling components after disassembly.

Project Achievements

In addition to several on-site surveys of major domestic wood component manufacturing companies, we also studied advanced upcycling cases in Germany (Munich, Rosenheim and Berlin), France (Paris), and Sweden (Onsala and Gothenburg). Based on these researches, we proposed and made prototypes of system furniture using offcut wood and waste wood. Through the implementation of the project, researchers in the fields of engineering and agriculture, as well as key players in the production of wooden buildings, such as component manufacturers and construction companies, participated in the project, forming an industry-academia collaborative research team that aims to promote the recycling of wood.

Future Prospects

The team formed by SPIRITS plans to make a proposal to companies and orgainsation that might be interested in realizing or commercializing the prototypes for social implementation in a 1:1 scale, as well as to try to implement the prototype in architectural and landscaping projects being planned and designed in the KOMIYAMA laboratory.

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Principal Investigator