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Design, construction and assessment of FLO:RE – the prototype of a low-carbon building floor made of reused concrete elements and steel profiles

Küpfer, Célia  
•
Bastien-Masse, Malena  
•
Bertola, Numa  
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June 1, 2025
Architecture, Structures and Construction

Carefully extracting reinforced concrete (RC) elements from soon-to-be demolished structures and reusing them directly as load-bearing elements in new buildings is an emerging circular low-carbon resource-management strategy. As floor construction typically accounts for a large share of a building’s upfront carbon footprint, designing floors with reused RC elements is a promising, yet little explored, approach to lower a building’s embodied carbon. This paper presents the concept, design, construction and assessment of a new load-bearing floor system for an office building made with reused saw-cut RC pieces and reused steel profiles. The system reuses the existing properties of widely discarded construction materials – RC and steel – and is dismountable. To demonstrate the system’s technical feasibility and assess its structural and environmental performance, a 30-m2 prototype – FLO:RE – is designed, built with elements reclaimed from local demolition sites, tested and finally dismantled. Reclaimed material property testing and prototype load testing confirm the structural-design safety. A Life-Cycle Assessment shows unprecedentedly low upfront embodied carbon, with results as low as 15 to 5 kgCO2e/m2, i.e., 80–94% reductions compared to conventional new RC flat slabs. This research demonstrates the untapped technical and environmental potential of reusing saw-cut RC elements in bending in structurally performant floor systems. Through this novel ultra-low-carbon solution, the study supports the efficient use of existing resources and calls for considering soon-to-be demolished RC and steel structures as potential mines of suitable quality materials ready to be reused locally.

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10.1007_s44150-025-00138-2.pdf

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Published version

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openaccess

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CC BY

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2.39 MB

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130e853be7e15b8e387d1de03ddefed0

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