Life cycle assessment and life cycle costing for demolition waste management

Abstract

Ninety five percent of the construction and demolition waste is recycled in the Netherlands. Most of it is used for low value applications such as road base materials; the use of secondary material in buildings is still less than 3%7. In order to recover waste for higher value applications, enhancing selective demolition and waste management practices is of crucial importance. In this study Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing of a demolition project in Almere was carried out to identify the environmental and financial hotspots in the selective demolition and waste management in the Dutch context. Results suggest that (1) the best practice selective demolition and (2) the substitution of virgin concrete aggregate with secondary aggregate processed by Advanced Dry Recovery (ADR) system, will lead to environmental and financial improvements compared to the business as usual practice. On the building level, the advantage is mainly due to connecting the demolition and the re-development projects, which maximizes local reuse of old building components in the new building. The key of success for selective demolition is pre-audit to identify and connect to the market for material reuse. This is a direction that BIM (building information modeling) technology can contribute. With regards to the ADR concrete aggregate manufacturing, it was found that the transport distance for aggregate supply was the largest contributor to the environmental impacts and costs. Therefore it is important to locate ADR facilities next to concrete manufactures and/or provide ADR service on- site.