Barriers to reusing and recycling office fit-out: An exploratory analysis of demolition processes and product features

© 2020 by the author(s). Within the highly waste-generative context of Australia, waste from demolition of office fit-out significantly contributes to unsustainable landfilling. The extant literature is, however, slim on scrutiny of the situation. Therefore, this study aims to uncover office fit-out demolition processes and product features that drive high ratio of landfilling fit-out elements. The research used ten case projects and fourteen interviews to document visible and latent parameters of office fit-out waste. Waste-stream mapping and decision-tree techniques, in conjunction with basic descriptive statistics, were used to model and visualize the extent and drivers of unsustainable fit-out demolition. Further, an exemplar product features analysis was conducted to validate the identified drivers. The findings show that 78% of fit-out waste from the studied cases is landfilled. This high rate is attributed to both latent and visible factors. The main latent factor is high lease price of premium or high-quality offices which favours expeditious demolition with low consideration for reuse and recycling. Key technically visible barriers are volumetric furniture, heterogeneous fit-out assemblies, and insufficient critical mass. To move away from landfilling, production of office fit-out should be transformed for sustainable material adequacy, product re-configurability and de-constructability, and easy handling in the use phase

Applications of electroencephalography in construction

A wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) is considered a means for investigating psychophysiological conditions of individuals in the workplace in order to ameliorate occupational health and safety. Following other sectors, construction scholars have adopted this technology over the past decade to strengthen evidence-based practices to improve the wellbeing of workers. This study presents the state-of-the-art hardware, algorithms, and applications of EEG as a platform that assists in dealing with the risk-prone and complex nature of construction tasks. After summarizing the background of EEG and its research paradigms in different sectors, a comprehensive review of EEG-enabled construction research is provided. First, through a macro-scale review aided by bibliometric analysis a big picture of the research streams is plotted. Second, a micro-scale review is conducted to spot the gaps in the literature. The identified gaps are used to classify the future research directions into theoretical, application, and methodological developments

An Integrated Product Planning and Design Platform in the Context of Housebuilding Industry

© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers. The purpose of mass-customization strategies is to achieve product variety to satisfy different customer tastes while increasing the standardization of products to gain economic benefits through industrial mass-production strategies. Prefabricated construction has been adopted as a valuable construction methodology to help achieve mass-customization goals. The concept of product platforms represents a manifestation of mass customization that is a well-known terminology in the manufacturing industry, which is yet to be strongly integrated with the building sector due to various market features surrounding customer demands and product types. The literature suggests that the design work, as a bridge between the customer requirements and the final product, plays a significant role in achieving the market benefits of variety, as well as economic benefits of mass production. However, both customization and standardization of buildings are currently subjective with little consideration to their interactions. These results in suboptimal adoption of mass-customized solutions in building construction. In this research, an integrated framework for a product planning and design platform is introduced which accounts for costs and benefits of various stakeholders over the supply-chain of prefabricated housebuilding projects, i.e., manufacturers, suppliers, logistics parties, designers, construction companies, and customers. The framework utilizes building codes and modular product planning techniques to determine preliminary product architecture. The resulting product architecture is then used as a basis for parametric design optimization with a set of constraints and objective functions specified by different stakeholders along the supply-chain. The stakeholders rely on a common building information modelling platform through which presents terminologies that are utilized in the determination of constraints and objectives. This framework can be used by designers as a decision-support system, as well as manufacturers and construction companies to optimize their own processes