Energy impacts of recycling disassembly material in residential buildings

In order to stop the global warmth due to the CO2 concentration, the energy use should be decreased. The investment of building construction industry in Japan is about 20% of GDP. This fraction is much higher than in most dev eloped countries. That results the Japanese building construction industry including residential use consumes about one third of all energy and resour ces of the entire industrial sectors. In order to save energy as well as re source, the recycle of the building materials should be urgent to be carrie d out. In this paper, we focus on the potential energy savings with a simpl e calculated method when the building materials or products are manufacture d from recycled materials. We examined three kinds of residential buildings with different construction techniques and estimated the decreased amount of energy consumption and resources resulting from use of recycled material s. The results have shown for most building materials, the energy consumpti on needed to remake housing materials from recycled materials is lower than that to make new housing materials. The energy consumption of building mat erials in all case-study housing can be saved by at least 10%. At the same lime, the resource, measured by mass of building materials (kg) can be decr eased by over 50%. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.