Sustainable Building Applications: Evaluating Thermal Characteristics of Concrete Blocks from Construction and Demolition Waste

The disposal of construction waste presents a significant environmental challenge, with a substantial volume deposited in landfills and illegal dumping sites. A sustainable solution to this issue involves recycling construction waste into resourceful building materials such as masonry blocks, which has emerged as a sustainable alternative. Blocks constitute a large proportion of materials often used as building envelopes and contribute to the energy needs of a building. However, the thermal performance of the combined use of Construction and Demolition wastes (CDW) to produce blocks has received little attention. Therefore, this presentation addresses these issues and presents an assessment to the thermal properties of novel concrete blocks made from different recycled CDW for potential sustainable and energy-efficient building applications. In addition to experimentally conducted tests on the hardened properties and a sustainability impact assessment. Important findings will be shown in terms of the experimental and simulation tests for assessing the energy performance of the blocks when utilized as a single-layer building envelope. / Novel blocks mixture will be introduced which could decrease typical raw material consumption by up to 35% while substantially reducing thermal conductivity and heat transfer by more than half. average annual electricity consumption can be decreased by 114.87 kWh. The energy-use intensity of these blocks can improve energy efficiency by up to 9.28%. The sustainability assessment revealed that the developed concrete blocks could achieve lower production costs and carbon emission reductions, up to 31.60%, than typical concrete blocks. These blocks, therefore, present the masonry block market with a sustainable approach by offering improved performance and cost reductions in raw material consumption, energy savings, and environmentally friendly block production.