Measuring to reduce waste in construction and housing: presentation of an innovative thesis by a group of students from the Master’s degree course in Systemic Design.
A group of students from the Master’s Degree in Systemic Design at the Polytechnic of Turin, consisting of Fabrizio Mariani, Davide Montaquila, Davide Nonis, Juri Sanni and Davide Sito, has developed a new model that aims to achieve sustainability of the ‘House System’ in the process of constructing and inhabiting buildings. The thesis project, whose rapporteur and co-rapporteurs are Prof. Silvia Barbero, Alessandro Campanella and Martina Spinelli, is based on the Systemic Design approach and methodology developed by the Sys Research Centre – Systemic Design Lab.
For the development of the study, entitled WIP: Wellness & Innovation Program, the undergraduates adopted a co-design approach with the Building Group, which provided technical support and access to all the documentation related to the projects carried out since 2015. The collaboration is part of a project between Politecnico di Torino and Exclusive Brands Torino, the network of excellence in Piedmont, designed to integrate the academic fabric with virtuous entrepreneurial realities in the area.
In the construction of buildings, around 5.4 million tonnes of mixed waste are disposed of every year in Italy. This is a quantity of waste that is difficult to recover and requires more attention from companies. Equally considerable is the volume of resources that are wasted in the housing context, due to inadequate levels of energy efficiency in residences and as a result of tenants’ bad habits. This highly innovative study analyses and proposes intervention solutions that impact both aspects: process and living.
The Building Group allowed the group of systemic designers to apply the elaborated model on real cases, measuring its effectiveness and applicability in different housing contexts. The students had the opportunity to visit the Gate Central building site in Milan and UpTown Turin, repeatedly confronting figures such as the head of the technical office and the site manager.
A SYSTEM FOR THE EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF CONSTRUCTION WASTE
The WIP model applied to the Building Group starts from the aggregation of regulations, guidelines, strategies and case studies on waste management for efficient reuse in a circular economy perspective, starting in the 2000s, when the subject of CDW (construction and demolition waste) began to be theorised. These interconnected documents generated a navigable taxonomy tool that makes consultation intuitive and immediate for planners. The search subsequently integrated around 1,500 documents contained in the Building Group’s archives, acquiring all the transport notes (FIRs) of materials leaving the construction sites. Twenty thousand excel cells were manually compiled to feed a database that returned over 3 million results.
By cross-referencing this data with the models and regulations studied, it was then possible to develop a complete monitoring tool for construction sites, through an interactive application that takes into account the quantity and type of materials, providing real-time infographics and statistics useful for timely intervention and optimising waste management. To do this, the students designed a prototype app that allows the acquisition and processing of transport notes from smartphones.
CONSCIOUS HOME LIVING
The second part of the project aimed to analyse the impact of residents on the ‘Home System’, in order to assess the volume of consumption and suggest virtuous behaviours that favour the reduction of waste, in line with the achievement of the objectives of the European Union’s Green Deal. Turin is one of the 9 Italian cities that are part of the Net Zero Cities project, an EU pilot project that calls for interventions and innovation paths towards climate neutrality by 2030. This challenge cannot be separated from a greater awareness of waste. In this sense, the WIP model is not intended to provide a one-size-fits-all behavioural model but the tools to act consciously and take responsible actions.
Italy, despite being among the European countries most affected by drought, has a daily per capita water consumption of 236 litres, almost double the continental average of 123 litres. The residential sector produces 36% of the CO2 emitted into the environment, a figure strongly influenced by a careless use of resources. Moreover, buildings suffer from a serious technological backwardness: in Piedmont, almost half of the houses are in energy class G (24.1%) and F (23.8%); only 9.4% are in energy class A. The latter, although decidedly more efficient than the first two, can record an actual consumption that can be up to three times higher than expected due to a lack of awareness of the technologies used in them.
Similar to the site data collection, the group of undergraduates devised a platform capable of measuring the consumption of residents’ households, exploiting the potential of home automation. The field research was conducted by analysing the habits of the inhabitants of The Number 6 condominium in Turin. This analysis allows the identification of waste and consumption anomalies and suggests virtuous behaviour and reminders to the user. Increased awareness may lead the user to discourage old habits in favour of more effective and sustainable action, through an information strategy that includes the definition of clear and performance-related objectives.
