Material savings through structural steel reuse: A case study in Genoa

One of the most challenging issues in the field of sustainable design is that of limiting the environmental impact of structural systems, as they contribute significantly to raw material consumption, global carbon emissions and solid waste production. This paper addresses the approach of the reuse of steel structure without melting which allows for savings in steel mass and the reduction of waste amounts offering moreover an opportunity to avoid environmental burdens related to the recycling process. Recent studies have stressed the technical feasibility of this strategy, which appears particularly effective in those countries in which a building's life is rather short, such as in Japan and US, though its application encounters more difficulties in most European countries, owing to longer building use. Besides stressing the architectural and structural feasibility of the above-mentioned strategy, this research work aims to quantify the mass savings that are achievable in this manner by presenting a real case study set in Italy. It consists in a railway station, which has been designed keeping in mind the partial employment of structural elements recovered from an old industrial building that is no longer in use. To estimate the amount of steel saved, two different structural models for the designed building have been carried out and compared. In the first one, the structure has been designed on the assumption of the reusing of recovered structural elements; in the second one, the same structure has been designed considering the use of new elements only. The final result of the analysis shows that steel reuse allowed for savings of up to 30% of steel.