Urban Metabolism and Construction & Demolition Waste. Life Cycle Assessment as a tool to support the territorial regeneration

The present research thesis aims to lay the foundations for the development of a model capable of supporting environmental assessment linked to the regeneration of the territory, through the union of two components: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and wasted landscapes. After a first definition of the field of research investigated, which has as its object urban ecosystems in relation to the metabolic flows that cross them, the instrument of LCA is introduced. LCA is born in the industrial field as a tool for assessing the environmental impacts related to the life cycle of products and services and can also focus on individual phases of this cycle, such as that of Waste Management (WM). This tool is linked to individual products, but in recent times, some research topics have investigated the possibility of extending it to one or more activities that characterize the functioning of the territory, in order to give life to a LCA of territorial nature. A first analysis of the territory is conducted through the concept of ecosystem health, that is translated from the ecological to the urban field in order to qualify the urban health from an economic, environmental and social perspective. Through a combination between Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and Geographic Information System (GIS), the territory can be classified according to its level of urban health. Three different perspectives have been considered: “vigour”, “organisation” and “resilience” and according to this framework, a system of indicators has been developed, identifying their territorial distribution. The application provides a subdivision of the Metropolitan Area of Naples (MAN) and the Focus Area (FA) contained in it in different zones with various degrees of resistance to risks and vulnerabilities. The main experimental application of the present research is the use of the LCA tool to evaluate the impacts related to the management of Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) flow, integrated by a Life Cycle Costing (LCC) model. CDW crosses both Campania Region and the Focus Area (FA) selected within the Horizon 2020 project called “REPAiR - Resource Management in Peri-Urban Areas: Going Beyond Urban Metabolism”, to which this thesis is linked. Subsequently, it is introduced a second vision of territorial nature that concerns the territorial outcomes of Urban Metabolism (UM) linked to urban and peri-urban life cycles, which, by exhausting the available resources, generate not only waste, but also wasted landscapes (wastescapes). Wasted landscapes can be, as it will be seen in the following chapters, of various kinds and the attention is focused on the portion of territory characterized by the presence of abandoned industrial buildings. By identifying the abandoned buildings of the FA, a second experimental application examines the case study of the former Rhodiatoce factory, for which, through a calculation model, CDW deriving from a building renewal process is assumed. The same LCA model that was used to assess the impacts of the total flows produced in the Region and in the FA, is used to verify the environmental impacts related to this scenario at the construction scale. This approach represents an exemplification that could be repeated in relation to all the other abandoned industrial buildings, in order to assess the environmental and economic impacts linked to their regeneration. Definitely, the idea is to present a new utility attributable to LCA and to lay the foundations for the creation of an evaluation model which allows to make the decision making phase linked to the regeneration of wasted territories more aware.