From waste to locally sourced building materials. Tools to support a prosuming community.

The activities of a prosumers community involve the creation of micro-infrastructures and new self-production centers, which manage the activities of collection, transformation and distribution of energy and matter. The study takes as case study a portion of the urban fabric in the city of Milan, characterized by the presence of an elevated road infrastructure. It illustrates some techniques for mapping the production of waste in urban contexts together with other information useful to make the local community aware of the real possibility of partial self-management of solid waste and trace common lines for the creation of community self-production centres aimed at closing technical cycles. The feasibility of such micro experimental facilities depends on the possibility of locally producing and/or managing goods useful to cover the main expenditure flows of the settled community, the main spending patterns of local inhabitants are electricity, heat, food and transportation. Consequently, the community production practices chosen give particular importance to the self-production of materials / systems for the energy retrofitting of existing buildings and to the enhancement of the energy and food production capacities associated with them.