Assessment of reusability of components from single-storey steel buildings

This paper presents the development of the method for prediction of reusability of building components and whole structures. The method was developed especially for single-storey steel buildings, but can be applied with some modifications for any component (or cluster of components) reclaimed from a demolished or refur-bished building. It enables classification of various building parts and products through a procedure to calcu-late their reusability index. These values can be further used to produce a single reusability indicator of the whole end-of-life scenario (e.g. the complete or partial building reuse). The aggregated result of the whole building may be very useful in planning of demolition or reconstruction works as well as for the assessment of the environmental impact of the new buildings. The main novelty explored in this paper is the possibility of in-tegrating the economical prospect of the recovered components in the reusability assessment. Indeed, the ear-lier developed reusability index was purely based on the technical requirements of recovering, remanufactur-ing and reusing component. Hence, it was a technical reusability indicator. The added element here is the pos-sibility to include information on the prospective marketability of the recovered component. The methodology is benchmarked on a suite of single-storey hall type structures of different structural configuration.