Building from building waste: The development of an instrument to determine the circularity of materials from the existing building stock in order to maximise high quality reuse

On a global level the population growth and increase of the middle class lead to a growing demand on material resources. The built environment has an enormous impact on this scarcity. In addition, a surplus of construction and demolition waste is a common problem. The construction industry claims to recycle 95% of this waste but this is in fact mainly downcycling. Towards the circular economy, the quality of reuse becomes of increasing importance. Buildings are material warehouses that can contribute to this high quality reuse. However, several aspects to achieve this are unknown and a need for more insight into the potential for high quality reuse of building materials exists. Therefore an instrument has been developed that determines the circularity of construction waste in order to maximise high quality reuse. The instrument is based on three principles: ‘product and material flows in the end of life phase’, ‘future value of secondary materials and products’ and ‘the success of repetition in a new life cycle’. These principles are further divided into a number of criteria to which values and weighting factors are assigned. A degree of circularity can then be determined as a percentage. A case study for a typical 70s building is carried out. For concrete, the circularity is increased from 25% to 50% by mapping out the potential for high quality reuse. During the development of the instrument it was clarified that some criteria are difficult to measure. Accurate and reliable data are limited and assumptions had to be made. To increase the reliability of the instrument, experts have reviewed the instrument several times. In the long-term, the instrument can be used as a tool for quantitative research to reduce the amount of construction and demolition waste and contribute to the reduction of raw material scarcity.

The effect of innovation on hotel market value

The purpose of this article is to analyze the effect of hotel innovations on firm value. Specifically, this study fills a research gap in the previous literature by examining this effect through market value and by distinguishing the potentially different impacts of distinct innovation types: product, process, organization and marketing. This research contributes to consolidating the empirical evidence of hotel innovation and performance by analyzing whether distinct types of innovation lead to different levels of results. The findings show that innovations are perceived to have a positive impact on the future sales of the company: in a four-day period (0,+3), there is an increase in stock exchange returns of 1.53%. In terms of innovation types, process and marketing innovations are found to have a higher positive effect on hotel market value than product and organization innovations; which is explained by potential cost differences among innovations.

Amphibian Hotspots and Conservation Priorities in Eastern Cuba Identified by Species Distribution Modeling

The high rate of amphibian endemism and the severe habitat modification in the Caribbean islands make them an ideal place to test if the current protected areas network might protect this group. In this study, we model distribution and map species richness of the 40 amphibian species from eastern Cuba with the objectives of identify hotspots, detect gaps in species representation in protected areas, and select additional areas to fill these gaps. We used two modeling methods, Maxent and Habitat Suitability Models, to reach a consensus distribution map for each species, then calculate species richness by combining specific models and finally performed gap analyses for species and hotspots. Our results showed that the models were robust enough to predict species distributions and that most of the amphibian hotspots were represented in reserves, but 50 percent of the species were incompletely covered and Eleutherodactylus rivularis was totally uncovered by the protected areas. We identified 1441 additional km2 (9.9% of the study area) that could be added to the current protected areas, allowing the representation of every species and all hotspots. Our results are relevant for the conservation planning in other Caribbean islands, since studies like this could contribute to fill the gaps in the existing protected areas and to design a future network. Both cases would benefit from modeling amphibian species distribution using available data, even if they are incomplete, rather than relying only in the protection of known or suspected hotspots.

Distance, evidentiality and counter-argumentation: Concessive future in Spanish

The aim of this paper is to examine the connection between Spanish concessive future and evidentiality. More specifically, it is argued that concessive future does not merely represent a contextual variant of conjectural future (Escandell, 2010) but a new use (Squartini, 2012) which is restricted by the activated status of the proposition ( Dryer, 1996). Unlike conjectural future, concessive future does not have an inferential purpose; instead, it plays a role within the (counter) argumentation process. It actually develops a déréalisant function ( Ducrot, 1995). Therefore, although conjectural use and concessive use share the deictic value of future, they are the projection of this value over different levels of meaning. More generally, this paper shows that future in Spanish may intersect with several semantic and discourse categories, including – but not limited to – evidentiality.