From 21st-24th of April, our partner Ragn-Sells participated in the Nordbygg fair in Stockholm, Sweden, the biggest fair for property owners and construction companies in Sweden.
Ragn-Sells presented its closed-loop solution for flat glass, where flat glass waste is recycled into raw material for the production of new flat glass. This offers major climate benefits, with greenhouse gas emissions reduced by around 53% across the whole value chain. In Sweden, around 35,000 tonnes of flat glass are landfilled each year, showing the high potential of this solution.
Because of this potential, Ragn-Sells chose flat glass as one of the material flows to pilot within the Reincarnate project. The closed-loop process for flat glass always starts with an inventory of the existing windows. Reincarnate has developed a BIM-based approach for the digitalisation of buildings.
In the pilot, Ragn-Sells developed a digital copy of the building where the windows were to become recycled raw material for new flat glass. This made it possible to inventory the number of windows, identify their type, and measure their geometry, volume and weight before dismantling. The digital copy also helped plan handling and logistics for the windows.
Using the digital copy, it took just over ten minutes to identify 10.2 tonnes of windows suitable for flat glass recycling. Without it, this would have taken hours.
This clearly showed the value of using BIM models to plan renovations or demolitions: understanding the materials inside a building before work starts, identifying what can be reused or recycled, and making the work much more efficient and easier to plan.