Material savings through structural steel reuse: A case study in Genoa

One of the most challenging issues in the field of sustainable design is that of limiting the environmental impact of structural systems, which contribute significantly to the global carbon emissions and solid waste production. This paper addresses the approach of steel structures reuse without melting, since it offers the opportunity to avoid the environmental burdens related to the recycling process. Recent studies have stressed the technical feasibility of this strategy, which appears particularly effective in those countries in which buildings life is rather short, such as Japan and US; nevertheless, its application encounters more difficulties in most of European countries, own to a longer building use. Besides stressing the architectural and structural feasibility of the mentioned strategy, this research work aims at quantifying the environmental savings achievable through it, by presenting a real case study set in Italy. It consists in a railway station which has been designed supposing of partially employing the structural elements recovered from an old industrial building no longer used. To estimate the saved steel amount (and, thus, the avoided emissions), two different structural models of the designed building have been carried out and compared. In the first one, the structure has been designed by supposing the use of reused structural elements; in the second one, the same structure has been designed considering the use of new elements only. The two models have been compared in terms of energy consumption and dioxide emissions associated.