An overview of circular economy for wooden construction

Abstract

Circular Economy(CE) is an economic concept, which is in the framework of sustainable development. Circular economy is mostly related to the use of material after their life cycle, and has to be implemented at the design stage of a product or a system. On the one hand, increasing the taxes and the expenses for waste disposal, and on the other hand, decreasing in the resources push industries forward in using circular economy. Nowadays due to the increase in the population, the need for shelter increase and among the materials, which can be used in building, wood is becoming more popular. As wood resources face depletion and wooden houses can have a long lifetime, there will be lots of possibilities for re-using the wooden parts. But as the types of wood for being used in different industries differ, selecting the best type of wood and the future use of it in other industries have to be considered in the buildings’ designing stage. In this work at first the structure and life cycle of the buildings were studied. After that, a new circular structure has been proposed by involving CE in the previous structure. Then by defining appropriate indicators, the use of wood as the main raw material for constructions evaluated. This evaluation has been done by the means of multi criteria decision-making(MCDM) methods.