Assessing the impact of selective demolition techniques on C&D waste management

Abstract Construction and demolition (C&D) waste is one of the heaviest and most voluminous waste streams generated nowadays in the world. Improper management of C&D waste often results in considerable environmental impacts. This study investigates the potential environmental impacts related to the end-of-life stage of buildings, focusing on how the use of different demolition techniques can influence the performances of the entire system of waste management. The main aim is to investigate if and how the environmental impacts associated to the selective demolition, that may be even higher than the ones associated to traditional techniques, are compensated by the benefits deriving from the waste recovery, reuse and recycling, that selective demolition is expected to maximize. The Life Cycle Assessment methodology is used to analyse and compare different scenarios: a selective demolition scenario for a residential building is compared with a traditional demolition one. Primary site-specific data supplied by demolition companies has been used. Indeed, unexpectedly, the selective demolition scenario results worse than the traditional one. Actions to improve the selective demolition have thus been identified.