Retrofitting with organic waste metabolism

Is it possible to retrofit existing building facades in a way to respond to the local materials’ availability? By following the sufficiency objective together with the efficiency one, natural resources and existing buildings’ surfaces are the focuses of this research. Accordingly, the solution of bio-based building materials as building components is becoming increasingly relevant as they have very low or even positive impacts on the environment. In favour of not enter into competition with the food and biofuel sectors, we concentrated the analysis on organic waste, e.g. rice straw. Once their performances as building materials have been assessed, one of the main issues to foster their entrance in the construction sector is to understand their volume availability. Indeed, by creating new building typologies promoting the production, optimization and distributed management of local organic wastes through digital and reliable tools, it will be possible to solve specific urban problematics. Moreover, these territorial characteristics highlight the importance of a limited scale. Therefore, this study focuses on the collection of current databases for the Lombardy Region as a case study together with the rice waste, to understand how to improve current information infrastructures for sustainable design purposes.