Using System Dynamics Method to Manage Construction and Demolition Waste

Abstract

During last few decades, construction and demolition waste has attracted great attention from practitioners and researchers, as well as governments in all over the world. It's obvious that construction and demolition waste and its control is very important in many aspects. In other hand, system dynamics is an empirical tool and waste management system is a dynamic system that needs to be studied and analyzed dynamically so that many misconceptions and problems in this area to be avoided. The main question is how we can manage and control waste management system to have a less amount of negative impacts on the environment and society. In order to answer this main question, this paper tries to represent a conceptual model called “cause and effect diagram” to have a general and typical understanding of waste management system especially in Ardabil city. Next, it represents Stock-Flow diagram that has capability of running in computer for further analyzing. Then, it simulates the model by POWERSIM software to analyze and optimize the dynamic model. The study indicated that increasing values of the variables including fines for illegal dumping, unit cost of landfilling, unit cost of collecting, unit cost of transportation and also developing waste management sites has implications of a low illegal waste dumping and a high amount of waste recycling and reuse.