End-of-life waste management practices: A brief review

Abstract

Effective management of construction and demolition waste is one of the key aspects of sustainable construction. As such, many studies have been conducted on waste management in construction in general, however, only a very few focusing on demolition or the end-of-life (EOL) phase of buildings. Understanding and managing EOL waste is important, e.g., to avoid illegal landfills, but critical to implement Circular Economy (CE) in construction. CE aims to create a regenerative built environment to make buildings more adaptable for the future and allows reclaiming of useable materials and components from old buildings to further use elsewhere, especially with the help of Building Information Modeling (BIM). Therefore, this study was designed to assess the construction industry awareness of EOL waste management, identify relevant issues/barriers, and a set of strategies to overcome those barriers and implement CE in construction. This paper specifically focused on the outcomes of a systematic literature review extracting relevant issues/barriers and strategies. A total of twenty-three barriers/issues in six groups and twenty-one strategies in four groups have been extracted. The six groups of issues/barriers are policy, sociological, expenses, technology, research and development, and time-related barriers. Among these, sociological barriers, particularly the lack of awareness, education, and publicity are perceived to be the major issues. Among the four groups of strategies, i.e. policy, organisational, technological, research, and development; Formulation of policies and setting goals specifically in achieving sustainable EOL waste management are mostly suggested/cited by previous authors than others. While a summarised discussion on these groups and individual factors will be presented in the paper, the next stage of the study is to refine the various factors and conduct a structured questionnaire survey of the construction industry participants, to tap experiential knowledge and suggestions.