Collection
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Circular Wood for the Neighborhood
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Article
VIDEO: Circular Wood for the Neighborhood
Wood is increasingly demanded. It is used to make furniture, doors, windows, fences, and even as main construction material of houses and offices. Wood is a valuable renewable material and can store CO2, if grown and harvested correctly. Yet much waste wood from renovations and demolitions is discarded and burned. Its large variety in sizes, types and quality, and the presence of paint, nails or other metal left inside makes re-using even more difficult. Smart design and production technologies can help overcome these problems, enabling second-life wood applications with a positive impact. The research project ‘Circular Wood for the Neighbourhood’ explores these technological solutions for housing corporations.
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Article
KPI-Framework Circular Wood
The KPI model is a set of nine indicators, which can be used to analyze the impact of a circular application made of waste wood. A longlist of 20 indicators in four categories (material management, environmental, socio-cultural and economic) was drafted and then condensed to a set of 8 favorite indicators.
To calculate the indicators, validated models, databases and calculation models were used, e.g. the Idemat tool and Ecoinvent database for environmental impact and the BREEAM calculation method on releasability (“losmaakbaarheid”) for the circularity indicator. -
Article
Case Study #1: ‘Once my door, now my coffeetable’
Imagine a small renovation project, like a row of ten houses. Windows and doors are being replaced, and inhabitants are affected by the works. What if tenants were given back a valuable object, made from these doors? A small piece of furniture can help explain the need for a circular economy, given the current ongoing loss of valuable material resources. For tenants, this object can both raise awareness on societal challenges, and create a sense of belonging to their building -which can even be enhanced by involving them in the design. This is the focus of this Case-study: the development of a tool to co-design and produce custom objects from one door, using the potential of wood processing with industrial robots.
Unique designs
Harvested wood from renovations comes in a variety of sizes, type of wood, quality and finishing. The reuse of this uneven material stream can be facilitated by 3D scanning and sorting it upfront. Computer algorithms can then work with the collected data to generate unique designs, made from these pieces. To get a relevant outcome -and not only random packs of connected elements- the designer and/or end-user must define specific rules for these algorithms. These rules could direct the algorithm to create structures with three legs, or connect wood pieces in a strict perpendicular fashion, or place the thickest ones at the bottom, etc. Finally, the designer can re-run the program to optimize a design through various iterations.
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This case study is part of the 'Circular Wood for the Neighborhood' project, done at the ROBOT LAB and lead by the Digital Production Research Group (DPRG) of the Knowledge Center Technology, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS).
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Article
Case Study #2: ‘Once their windows, now our playground’
Large renovation projects offer interesting possibilities for circular wood. Imagine upgrading a whole neighborhood, with several high-rise apartment buildings from the 60’s. There, circular wood can be harvested in bigger volumes because many standard doors, doorframes and window frames come available at the same time. What could re-using this wood entail, if it was destined to upgrade the neighborhood? Could something for the community be created to strengthen the social fabric, which is often needed in these locations. This might encourage tenants take better care of their building, feeling connected to the place, which represents a positive impact for corporations too. This case study explores the design and production of a community outdoor structure, considering a specific stock of uneven wooden beams.
Design from Availability
In this case study, digital design and robotic production methods are integrated as a flexible tool. Algorithms optimize how to ‘fit’ a stock of circular wooden beams to a desired shape, arranging them as a spatial frame with variable connection nodes. Every node is different, yet that’s no problem for production: industrial robots can easily saw, mill and drill wooden beams, given variable angles and lengths. This design and production flexibility can also include tenants in a creative dialog, to co-design their community structure. In this concept, the processing of beams and nodes is like fabricating a kit of custom parts. When all elements are pre-fabricated and tagged by robots, it can be built together with local tenants.
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This case study is part of the 'Circular Wood for the Neighborhood' project, done at the ROBOT LAB and lead by the Digital Production Research Group (DPRG) of the Knowledge Center Technology, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS).
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Article
Case Study #3: ‘Once burned wood, now shared value’
The use of a building can change over time. During covid, many people were forced to work at home with limited working space. Now, the increasing housing shortage will probably ask for additional (temporary) interior transformations, towards more compact apartment layouts This case-study proposes a room divider system based on a parametric model, adaptable to specific room sizes and various aesthetic choices using circular wood and digital design. The division system is designed for disassembly, so that when dismantled -as tenants needs change- its elements can be re-processed and re-used for other applications. It is not only made with circular wood, it is also designed and produced with circularity in mind.
Circular material bank
Harvested wood from building renovations comes in different volumes and types. A perfect match between available wood and what is needed for ‘new’ applications, is rare. To match donating and receiving projects, the necessary alignment in planning renovations might be difficult for a single housing corporation. What if a shared material bank could be organized, to store large volumes of circular wood from different sources? This could be a solution for two or more housing corporations, working together towards a common goal. A bank to collect pieces with no prospects for immediate re-use that, when combined, can create a good starting point for manufacturing room divisions, fences, decorative panels or other systems, when needed.
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This case study is part of the 'Circular Wood for the Neighborhood' project, done at the ROBOT LAB and lead by the Digital Production Research Group (DPRG) of the Knowledge Center Technology, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS).
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Article
From used wood to new products for housing associations
Interview with Marta Male-Alémany and Tony Schoen, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Erik van Bergeijk, Rochdale housing corporation.
Platform31 is a partner in the Circular Wood for the Neighborhood project. In it we explore how digital production and robotisation can contribute to new applications for the reuse of wood from renovations by housing corporations. Now that we are almost at the end of the project, we talk to a few key people about the set-up, preliminary results and (possible) next steps...
Read the interview here.
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Article
Once my door, now my coffeetable
This is a paper about projects of circularity by Robot Lab in which the production processes of projects with wooden products that have added value for neighbourhoods and residents are described. For the production of these products, wood is recycled.
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Article
Once my door, now my coffeetable
Public presentation by Marta-Malé Alemany about circular wood projects undertaken at the ROBOT LAB, by the Digital Production Research Group (DPRG). It explains how digital design and robotic production processes can help create added value from wood waste, to make circular wooden objects for tenants or applications for housing corporation buildings and neighborhoods (where waste wood is harvested from).
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Part 2:
Speaker: Marta-Malé Alemany