Students from programmes undertaken at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid are currently taking part of the action ‘Transforming the construction value chain through technology: closing the loop of construction and demolition waste (CDW)’. This action takes places in the framework of the European Week for Waste Reduction and intends to raise awareness among students and trigger their creativity around the challenges linked to Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW). Debris resulting from construction activities, civil engineering works and their dismantling include a mix of materials that need to be responsibly managed. In Europe, around 1/3 of all waste generated in the EU is CDW.
Students enrolled in the Circular Supply Chains course (Master in Organisational Engineering), the Training For The Professional Digital Competence course (Master In Circular Economy, Minerals and Construction Products specialization), or collaborating with the project CircularizatE (group of students @ETSI Industriales working on in-campus circularity), will collaboratively research on the problem of CDW and look at the construction value chain ecosystem with a circular perspective. We expect them to come up with potential ideas ranging from building and infrastructure design (architects & civil engineers, CRADLE) to demolition and CDW treatment (GRAVE), taking advantage of the digital technologies such as IoT, artificial intelligence, blockchain, track&trace technologies and protocols, sorting technologies, etc. The result of this teamwork was presented on Nov 22 at ETSI Industriales UPM supported by a digital poster and a 5-min pitch per team. The action is conceived as a pilot for a challenge based EELISA activity on CDW circularity co-driven by two EELISA communities: “The Circular and Regenerative Campus (CRC community)” and “Circular EELISA”, and to be launched in the second quarter of 2022 among students from the nine European Universities that conform EELISA.
