Development of a BIM-based web tool as Material and Component bank for a sustainable construction industry

The construction industry consumes an enormous amount of global resources and produces more waste than any other sector. The need to move toward sustainable development in construction requires significant changes in construction and demolition (C&D) waste management. The estimation of waste, recycling materials and reusable components could be vital in waste management, achieving huge efficiency in the construction industry. Moreover, a typical building comprises of an extensive amount of materials and components with various characteristics. This study proposes a Building Information Modelling (BIM) based system to allow the circular economy by storing information of the materials and components of buildings and by effectively managing the recycling of materials and reuse of components. A tool which serves as Material and Component (M&C) bank is developed with PHP and MYSQL by making use of a web browser able to extract the materials and component information of a building through the BIM model. This information is vital for several uses such as quantification of C&D waste and assessing for the design for deconstruction. It can also be used to obtain the information of reusable condition of the components and instructions for the reconstruction.