Environmental acceptability of beneficial use of waste as construction material—State of knowledge, current practices and future developments in Europe and in France

Abstract

Since a decade, numerous industrial and public initiatives have been launched in order to make knowledge, practices and mentalities evolve in relation to the acceptability of using waste instead of raw material as construction product. The objectives of these initiatives have been to evaluate current practices and to make new solutions and beneficial use channels emerge. At the same time scientific and standardisation communities have developed methodologies and tools to fit with the assessment needs expressed by industrialists and public decision-makers. In spite of that, some factors, some of them being cross-linked, make the perpetuation of beneficial use channels or even the concretisation of research projects difficult. To cope with this situation, in the framework of sustainable development applied to natural and alternative material, the French Directorate of Road has launched a project aiming at providing public contracting authorities with a document gathering both technical and environmental requirements that they can prescribe in public market tender calls to promote the use of waste and out-of-technical-specifications-material. This paper deals with the presentation of this project focusing more specifically on the approach to assess both technical and environmental acceptability of waste and out-of-technical-specifications-material to be used as alternative material in road construction in France. The current European situation is first described and this paper finally discusses briefly the other key aspects – than environmental acceptability – that have to be taken into account to succeed waste beneficial use.