Stakeholders’ impact on the reuse potential of structural elements at the end-of-life of a building: a machine learning approach

The construction industry, and at its core the building sector, is the largest consumer of non-renewable resources, which produces the highest amount of waste and greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Since most of the embodied energy and CO2 emissions during the construction and demolition phases of a building are related to its structure, measures to extend the service life of these components should be prioritised. This study develops a set of easy-to-understand instructions to facilitate the practitioners in assessing the social sustainability and responsibility of reusing the load-bearing structural components within the building sector. The results derived by developing and then employing advanced machine learning techniques indicate that the most significant social factor is the perception of the regulatory authorities. The second and third ranks among the social reusability factors belong to risks. Since there is a strong correlation between perception and risk, the potential risks associated with reusing structural elements affect the stakeholders’ perception of reuse. The Bayesian network developed in this study unveil the complex and non-linear correlation between variables, which means none of the factors could alone determine the reusability of an element. This paper shows that by using the basics of probability theory and combining them with advanced supervised machine learning techniques, it is possible to develop tools that reliably estimate the social reusability of these elements based on influencing variables. Therefore, the authors propose using the developed approach in this study to promote materials' circularity in different construction industry sub-sectors.