Exploring Post-Consumer Waste Reuse in High Performance Building Envelopes: Energy Efficiency and Environmental Impacts of End-of-Life Materials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines selected post-consumer waste materials for use in the building envelope including end-of-life tires, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and paper/cardboard fibres. Based on the state-of-the-art of their reuse in construction, various scenarios for each material are simulated. These are broadly categorised into three use types within the envelope: thermal mass, insulation, and interior panelling. These scenarios are simulated in EnergyPlus, against a high performing residential base case using conventional materials for comparison, located in Calgary, Alberta. The associated embodied energy and global warming potential of each scenario are evaluated in OpenLCA. Most cases, excluding tire chip insulation, yield annual heating and cooling loads within a 10% margin of the base case, making them suitable for high performing buildings. Thermal mass components which prioritise reuse and undergo minimal processing such as whole earth-filled tires and whole PET bottles set in concrete blocks, are most effective at mitigating base case impacts due to the large proportion of thermal mass within the overall envelope.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".