The existing building as a source of energy: proposal of a method for the development of operational procedures for reuse

Résumé En

In the last decades the strategies of waste recovery are at the center of the legislator's reflections for the transition to a circular model. At the same time, the need for urban densification compatible with today's environmental requirements entails the risk of functional and socio-economic obsolescence of the existing building stock.While the principles of design for disassembly are beginning to be increasingly integrated into the project process, for existing buildings, designed with technologies that did not provide for disassembly operations, this practice can encounter economic and technical barriers.To define a reuse management model for the existing building, thus reducing the technical obstacles, we rely on the concept of embodied energy, defined here as the difference between the energy required by all the elements that make up the building and the energy obtained by their valorization at the end of life. This definition poses problems when the analysis must be extended over time intervals in which significant technological evolutions have taken place. Overcoming these difficulties requires a revision of the relationship between elements and building to assess the energy that can be extracted from the building through an appropriate set of procedures at the given time.This article proposes a method for the development of operational procedures capable of increasing the potential of reuse – intended here as a system of exploitation of the energy incorporated in the existing buildings.