CIRCULAR ECONOMY AND BIO BUILDING: RICE WASTE

Circular economy
rMIX: Il Portale del Riciclo nell'Economia Circolare - Circular economy and bio building: rice waste

How to reconsider waste plant products for green building from a circular economy perspective


Which came first, the chicken or the egg? A witty joke that could easily be applied to the combination of green building and circular economy.

In fact we can say that the two fields feed each other, making the waste and waste market available to the building products industry, for the creation of increasingly green products .

In fact, in the past there is extensive documentation that describes how man had always tried to improve the healthiness and liveability of his homes , making the best use of what nature made available to him, both from an environmental and a raw materials on which he could count.

The slow evolution of construction processes and materials , over the centuries, has seen a slow but constant improvement in the living performance of constructed buildings, especially when bricks, glass, rudimentary thermal insulation, sewage systems and many others were used. innovations.

But the concrete turning point occurred during the 19th century , when the great availability of energy coming from fossil sources , coinciding with technological progress, created a new form of architecture, also understood as materials, based heavily on the futurization of industrial power and production in series of building elements. This transformation led to a progressive move away from the centrality of the environment and nature in building works and projects.

Around the 70s of the last century, doubts began to grow even in the construction sector about the sustainability of the materials used and the method of wild overbuilding which eroded the soil, polluted the environment and squandered energy resources.

The process that led to a new awareness between construction and the environment manifested itself, slowly, through different paths: the oil crises caused the increase in the cost of heating homes, prompting the creation of the first thermal insulators, urban pollution led to the study of new forms of exploitation of domestic energy, the growth of a new environmentalist consciousness called into question a series of materials that were difficult to recycle.

The idea of a new circularity in the use of buildings and the materials that compose them revolutionized the system right from the design phases, in which concepts such as green building and circular waste economy were included.

Today, this new course revolves around the environmental impact of the building , through the tool of the eco balance, which must consider all phases of the life of the structure, that is, it means analyzing the impact of the building in the phase before its construction, during the life of the building and after its existence, understood as the recovery of the materials that made it up.

Using the LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) methodology, adapted not to individual products, but to an entire building, we want to make an overall assessment of the project respecting the following parameters:

  • Compatibility : which consists in the evaluation of the work in the environmental context from an economic point of view, understood as less general waste over time.
  • Wellbeing : understood as the integration of man in balance with nature and its resources.
  • Recycling and reuse : understood as the search for a construction, even a dry one, in which the elements could be easily dismantled and reused at the end of the cycle.

From these concepts arise new forms of research that aim to retrace the circularity of the materials to be used, to create others suitable for construction, trying to minimize the withdrawal of raw materials from the environment.

In this context, materials move, understood as raw materials, which come from rice processing waste , reused as eco-compatible components, aimed at creating new construction elements.

By rice waste , we can identify the part that envelops it, called chaff or husk , which results after processing, through husking (mechanical action of cleaning the rice grain) of the product collected in the field, the waste of which affects from 17 to 23 % by weight.

The husk has a very hard and light consistency, with a density of approximately 135-140 kg/m3 and has excellent characteristics expressed in its rot-proofness and resistance to attack by insects. Since the product's nutritional intake is very low (3.3% protein and 1.1% fat), it is not generally used as animal feed.

In the furniture sector , rice husk is used, in compounds with resins, to create an artificial wood , suitable for the construction of docks, piers and outdoor urban furniture by virtue of its high waterproof properties, resistance to sun and rain , salt and snow.

In the field of housing construction, rice husk is used in some production processes:

  • Lightened screeds with strong thermo-acoustic insulation qualities
  • Plastering and finishing mortars through a mix of rice husk, siliceous aggregates and clay
  • Outdoor paints made from lime milk and rice husk
  • Internal and external wall panels, for thermo-acoustic insulation, composed of rice husk, magnesium oxide and soy starch acting as a binder.

The products composed of rice husk, straw and lime are light, tenacious, with thermal and acoustic characteristics and breathable.

Category: news - plastic - circular economy - green building

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