UWE secures key funding for construction waste research project
University of the West of England says pioneering project will ‘change the industry’
AN £800,000 grant has been secured by University of the West of England (UWE) for a construction waste research project it says will ‘change the industry’. The funding will help UWE develop a sophisticated computer programme to forecast which materials can be reused or recycled once a building is demolished.
The university hopes the tool will significantly reduce the proportion of landfill waste coming from the construction sector.
Professor Lukumon Oyedele, director of the Bristol enterprise research and innovation centre at UWE, said he believes the research programme could help cut construction costs by as much as 10%, due to savings made on the purchase of new materials.
He commented: ‘From the design stage of the building, we want to look at the deconstruction plan. We want to develop this tool with the aim of having an impact on policy change so new buildings that need to be constructed in the future must submit a deconstruction plan as part of the planning permission requirements.’
UWE is also hopeful the new intelligence-based tool will lead to savings on landfill tax (currently £80 per tonne) and a reduction in landfill gases and carbon emissions.
The research project has been named DRIM (Deconstruction and Recovery Information Modelling) and it will run for two years from April 2016, in collaboration with Coventry University and industry partners Waste Plan Solutions Ltd and Sustainable Direction Ltd.
