Construction and Demolition Waste Management on the building site: a literature review.

Paper in proceeding, 2017

The construction industry is under increasing pressure to reduce costs and improve environment quality. The construction and demolition waste management (CDWM) is a serious contender to achieve these two goals. Countries have provided legislation and professional associations and large companies have issued rules and guidelines to efficiently dismantle and organize the evacuation of these materials, especially addressing hazardous waste. A large focus in the literature on CDWM has been on minimization of waste, but less attention has been given to practices of how to minimize waste or how to manage CDW during the construction process. In order to gain an understanding of CDW during the construction process and on the building site we have performed a systematic literature review. Our goal is to identify and document the actual topics and debates related to CDWM, avoid to repeat already existing results and uncover less researched issues or topics. To do so we built on a systematic literature review on CDWM. Our initial search had 628 articles on CDW and CDW management. Through multiple selection procedures we ended up with 100 articles published in 21 scientific journals listed on Web of Science since 2010. We focus on articles referring directly to the building site as well as the management of CDW. We systematically organize the review according to the following criteria: topic, discipline, contribution, method, theory, and audience. The preliminary results show a large production of materials analyses, LCA assessment and performance, optimization of process models and economic comparison. The actual practices on the building site and the related management issues however are largely ignored by this academic production justifying that it may be worth studying these in the future.