Use of environment friendly recycled building materials in Egypt

الملخص EN

Building materials are all over the place.

they are the one which create the built environment.

choosing the appropriate material is a necessary step in the design process of the product, as the reliability of the design relies on the chosen materials.

the role of materials in architecture has a greater impact than just those to do with design and aesthetics.

they have cultural, moral, social and environmental impacts.

these implications are widely being ignored.

the main focus is being on the performance of the building, pure aesthetics in addition to the short-term economics of used materials.

usually, architecture and materials are only being taken into account in the terms of the user experience, with a very little or no consideration to impacts which result from the actual existence of the architecture itself.

that is why the problem of where materials come from and where they finally end up has a little or no effect on how architecture is applied as a whole [1].

on the other side waste is considered a result of a dead-end scenario within a linear process.

thus, countries with higher amount of waste can BS considered as the most polluters, or as countries having highest amounts of reusable resources.

from this point concept of recycling started to have its own impact in life cycle of each material [2].

recycling is the process of converting waste materials to reusable material.

recently, many countries started to depend on environmental recycled materials to achieve a better environmental performance with less energy consumption, as recycled materials save about 75% of energy in comparison with those made from scratch, and construction cost.

depending on recycling as a basic process to be applied on materials, products would be a part of a continuous reutilization and recovery process [3].

construction industry is working on developing the ecological buildings depending on using design and technical solutions which facilitate energy saving and one of the most effective techniques is using recycled materials.

this research aims to concentrate on recycled materials and evaluating their performance to raise awareness about the benefits of using these materials in building sector despite the great challenge of introducing alternative materials to the mainstream practice as it is usually a difficult and time-consuming process, in addition to that, the construction market is conservative and the rejection of new materials or techniques is very likely to happen for fear of risk taking.

proving that, recycled building materials have the potential to offer a better environmental performance of the building with less energy consumption and less cost in comparison with using conventional building materials.

in addition to that, recycled materials have the potential to close the circle in the life cycle of the building.

on the other side, Egypt has a great potential to use waste materials and develop recycling process depending on the great amounts of available waste materials that can be recycled instead of being thrown in landfills causing environment pollution.

this research will depend on a set of statistics issued by the Egyptian government regarding the quantities, classification, and types of waste materials available in Egypt.

it will also depend on the analysis of a group of previous literature reviews that studied recycled materials and their impact on the environmental performance of the building.

in addition to, making a comparative analysis between conventional and recycled materials to get out which have a better environmental performance.

since it will be difficult to be study all building materials, a group of commonly used materials was chosen like bricks as a construction building material, glazing as a material for facades, and plastic as a finishing material used in the interior.