Zhu Yuan Xiong, a PhD student at ETH Zurich, is building digital tools to find reusable materials hidden in existing buildings. The building sector produces 35% of global energy-related emissions. His work aims to give architects and engineers practical ways to support a circular economy.
Chapters
My name is Zhu Yuan xiong. I'm a PhD student at Chair of Sustainable Construction at ETH Zurich. I'm working on the project of Circular Future Cities which is supported by Future Cities Lab. My current research is actually focusing on trying to develop digital tools to support the circular economy in the built environment. We try to use data and maximize the circular material flows in the building environment, trying to identify what materials can we get out of old buildings and what can we fit into the new infrastructure. The building sector is actually contributing 35% of the global energy related greenhouse gas emissions. The industry experts say that actually the resource scarcity problem could even come before the the climate change issue fully takes effect. We don't have great solution for this. However, the circular economy offers a potential way to mitigate this problem and rethink how we can reuse and recycle materials. My research is actually trying to identify the potential materials embedded in the current infrastructure, specifically on the building system components. Materials which are additionally overlooked in the conventional building stock models. Normally you will focus on the structural materials, the heavy cumbersome parts. The building set components are often overlooked, but they're actually having high environmental impact in terms of the carbon footprint for the whole building. And they're actually normally quite standardized, quite lightweight, and have high circular potential to reuse or recycle. You can't identify the building system material from digital models or you can't detect it from the street view images. People are doing manual site visits to identify these materials, which is very time consuming. My research is trying to help with this problem by trying to estimate the potential materials embedded in the buildings. What excites me most is actually to think about how these digital technologies could enable the circular material flows. And from this research we hope not to only advance the technologies, but we also want to provide some actual guidelines for stakeholders like architects and engineers to really support the circular economy and make the material flow for the future.
