Post-Urban Mining Automation and Digitalisation for a Closed- Loop Circular Construction

The large volume of in- and out-flow of raw materials to construction projects has a huge potential to be optimised for resource efficiency and waste reduction. With the recent awareness of the
importance of the circular economy, construction actors are aligning their practices to be more circular
and sustainable. The concept of material banks is born out of this awareness in order to document the lifecycle information of materials and facilitate re-using them. The introduction of new cycles before individual materials reach their final lifecycle stages results in reduced negative environmental impacts.
This paper presents a workflow by positioning different digital technologies to automate the
procedures for reuse assessment: from the deconstructed building to M/C bank to new construction
projects. This automation supports a practical material and component reuse, while it provides the
necessary infrastructure to digitise and digitalise the post-deconstruction materials to be visualised,
selected and used by future designers in Building Information Modelling (BIM)-based design and
management environments. To this aim, the coupling of BIM, reality capturing technologies, additive
manufacturing techniques, IoT and RFID sensors is also anticipated.