Publications related to Construction waste

Towards edible robots and robotic food

Dario Floreano, Bokeon Kwak, Markéta Pankhurst, Jun Shintake

Edible robots and robotic food — edible systems that perceive, process and act upon stimulation — could open a new range of opportunities in health care, environmental management and the promotion of healthier eating habits. For example, they could enable ...

2024

Rising from rubble - Leveraging existing construction tools for upcycling concrete waste into slender walls

Katrin Beyer, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Stefana Parascho, Qianqing Wang, Maxence Grangeot

In this paper, we present a new method for upcycling concrete rubble waste into slender walls through the lightweight digital augmentation of mainstream construction machines. By using such method, the environmental impact of concrete construction and demo ...

Springer2024

Dataset for 'Printed ecoresorbable temperature sensors for environmental monitoring'

Danick Briand, Nicolas Francis Fumeaux, James Alec Pierce Bourely, Melissa Kossairi

This data set contains the data collected during the FNS project Green Piezo (Grant no. 179064) in association with the recent publication entitled “Printed ecoresorbable temperature sensors for environmental monitoring”. This work aims to study the effect ...

Zenodo2023

Printed degradable piezoelectric microsystems: From ink formulation to device fabrication and characterization

Morgan Mc Kay Monroe

As the world moves further and further into the semiconductor era, the amount of waste generated from electronics ("e-waste") is increasing rapidly and unsustainably. Of particular note, alternatives to lead-based piezoelectric materials must be establishe ...

EPFL2023

Experimental testing and structural analysis of composite tile – reinforced concrete domes

Savvas Saloustros

Conventional formworks for concrete curved shells either are expensive, complex and wasteful or have formal restrictions. Using tile vaults (also known as timbrel, Guastavino, thin-tile or Catalan vaults) as stay-in-place formwork for concrete shells could ...

2023

Low-tech methods for the reuse of reinforced concrete structural elements

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Maléna Bastien Masse, Nicole Widmer, Julie Rachel Devènes

Most of existing buildings are made of concrete, new buildings are being built with it and others are demolished when still in good structural condition. This drives increased demands for raw materials, greenhouse gas emissions, and an accumulation of demo ...

2023

Reusability Assessment of Obsolete Reinforced Concrete Structural Components

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Maléna Bastien Masse, Célia Marine Küpfer, Julie Rachel Devènes

The production of concrete, the most widely used construction material, detrimentally affects the environment. Obsolete reinforced concrete (RC) load-bearing structures, even when still in good condition, are today prematurely crushed and landfilled or rec ...

Springer2023

Lignin, from biomass waste to sustainable materials for food packaging, antiviral coatings and agriculture

Alice Boarino

Our planet has been challenged for years by our reckless use of fossil fuels, which has led to the ongoing climate change and energy crisis. The transition to the use of renewable alternative sources has now became urgent and inevitable. The valorization o ...

EPFL2023

Experimental investigation on the bending response of reuse-ready timber slabs – The Pixel Slab System

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Edisson Xavier Estrella Arcos, Johnny Syriani

Current construction practices follow linear economic models of "take-make-dispose" that result in substantial material landfilling after the end-of-life of buildings. This issue takes relevance given the construction industry's significant stake in the hi ...

International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS)2023

Environmental and economic analysis of new construction techniques reusing existing concrete elements: two case studies

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Maléna Bastien Masse, Célia Marine Küpfer, Julie Rachel Devènes

As the most widely used construction material worldwide, concrete is the main cause of greenhouse gas emissions, material depletion, and waste generation by the construction industry. Typically, concrete waste is crushed and, at best, reclaimed into recycl ...

2022

Additive manufacturing of ceramics by two-photon lithography, volumetric 3D printing and high-resolution endo-printing

Georgia Konstantinou

Additive manufacturing is a growing sector of industrial production that allows the fabrication of parts with complex geometries and reduced waste. The context of this thesis is light-based additive manufacturing technologies. In the first part of the the ...

EPFL2022

Why Do Companies Need Operational Flexibility to Achieve Sustainability at Source?

Ralf Seifert, Isik Bicer, Yara Kayyali El Alem

We analyze the environmental benefits of operational flexibility that emerge in the form of less product waste during the sourcing process by reducing overproduction. We consider three different options for operational flexibility: (1) lead-time reduction, ...

2022

Digital twins for post-earthquake damage assessment of free-standing buildings including damage information

Katrin Beyer, Radhakrishna Achanta, Bryan German Pantoja Rosero, Amir Rezaie

We present a pipeline for the automatic generation of digital twins of free-standing buildings for damage assessment. Our method takes multiple view images of the target building as input and processes them to produce a 3D model in levels of detail (LOD) f ...

2022

Circular economy digital market solutions for reuse in the European construction sector

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Martin Fröhlich, Maria Sivers

Focusing on the cross-matching supply and demand for reused building components and related services, the paper analyses existing Digital Reuse Market Solutions (DRMS) in the European construction sector. A collection of 746 DRMS is built from major online ...

2022

Interlaboratory Test Program to Determine the Precision of the R3 Test Method (ASTM C1897-20) for Measuring Reactivity of Supplementary Cementitious Materials

Karen Scrivener, Ruben Anton Snellings, Diana Londoño Zuluaga

The substitution of portland clinker by supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) is one of the main avenues for the further decarbonization of cement production. To secure future SCM supplies, generic and performance-related test methods for SCMs are re ...

AMER SOC TESTING MATERIALS2022

Strategies for a Circular Economy in the Construction and Demolition Sector: Identifying the Factors Affecting the Recommendation of Recycled Concrete

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Ivo Philippe Baur, Valeria Superti, Ralph Hansmann, Cynthia Houmani

With increasing urbanisation, new approaches such as the Circular Economy (CE) are needed to reduce resource consumption. In Switzerland, Construction & Demolition (C&D) waste accounts for the largest portion of waste (84%). Beyond limiting the depletion o ...

2021

Upcycling Space Structures (Preface to special issue)

Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Olivier Baverel

The construction industry’s contribution to the deterioration of Earth’s ecosystem is huge. 11% of all anthropic greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are due to the construction, demolition, and transformation of buildings and infrastructure. Construction an ...

2021

Intermolecular Pd(0)-Catalyzed Atropo-enantioselective C-H Arylation of Heteroarenes and Other Investigations into the Enantioselective Activation of Challenging C(sp3)-H Bonds

Qui-Hien Nguyen

The direct construction of stereogenic axes by enantioselective C-H arylation has been regarded as a very challenging transformation. Very few examples have been reported, despite the indisputable straight-forwardness of the methodology. This is due to the ...

EPFL2021

Sustainable green processing of grape pomace for the production of value-added products: An overview

Edgard Gnansounou

In recent years, the recovery of valuable compounds from food waste like grape pomace is an emerging issue in the food sector. Grape pomace or marc can be considered as an important solid waste that is produced from the wine industries after the pressing a ...

ELSEVIER2021

Idempotents in the endomorphism algebra of a finite lattice

Jacques Thévenaz, Serge Bouc

We give a direct construction of a specific central idempotent in the endomorphism algebra of a finite lattice T. This idempotent is associated with all possible sublattices of T which are totally ordered. A generalization is considered in a conjectural fa ...

2022