Environmental and Economic Trade-offs of Concrete Reuse in Structural Applications

Abstract

The construction industry is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, resource consumption, and construction and demolition waste. Structural concrete reuse offers an alternative to demolition and recycling by preserving the embodied value of existing components. However, its practical application depends not only on environmental benefits, but also on technical recovery conditions, logistics and direct construction costs. This research develops a deterministic framework for evaluating the technical, environmental, and economic trade-offs of structural concrete reuse. A normalized 10-storey cross-wall building was used to compare four pathways: direct precast reuse, virgin precast construction, virgin cast-in-place construction, and the reuse of saw-cut cast-in-place floor slabs. Recovery assumptions were informed by published reuse projects and the connection conditions of the case-building system. Direct costs were estimated using RSMeans data, while upfront Global Warming Potential was calculated in One Click LCA using a cut-off allocation approach. The direct precast reuse pathway assumes the recovery of 95% of the floor elements and 85% of the wall elements. It produced approximately 251,029 kg CO₂-e, representing a 75.9% reduction compared with virgin precast construction. Its estimated direct cost was approximately $2.25 million, which was 20.4% higher than the virgin precast baseline. This resulted in a Marginal Abatement Cost of approximately $482 per tonne of CO₂-e avoided. The saw-cut cast-in-place pathway assumes reuse of 85% of the floor-slab volume, while the complete wall system and the remaining 15% of the floor are supplied through new cast-in-place construction. This pathway reduced upfront GWP by 52.0% compared with virgin cast-in-place construction. It also reduced direct cost by approximately 2.1%, resulting in a MAC of approximately -$82 per tonne of CO₂-e avoided. The findings demonstrate that structural reuse is not necessarily associated with a uniform cost premium. Its economic performance depends on the recovery method and the virgin structural system used as the baseline. In both circular pathways, the principal environmental benefit resulted from avoiding virgin material production, while transportation, cutting, lifting and preparation created smaller additional impacts. This study concludes that concrete reuse can support construction-sector decarbonization, when recovery potential, connection conditions, logistics, compensatory material requirements and baseline selection are assessed together.