High quality recycling of construction and demolition waste in the Netherlands

Abstract

The high consumption pace of materials of the worlds population tend to cause scarcity of materials. Furthermore, the use of these materials in products have a negative impact on the environment. Once a product reaches the end of its useful life, it can again have a negative impact on the environment being discarded as waste. The building sector is accountable for a large share of the waste arising in the Netherlands, namely 40% of the total waste. Therefore, it is an important sector to take into account while reducing material use. The goal of this research is to decrease the use of primary materials in the building sector, by promoting high quality recycling of construction and demolition (C&D) waste. High quality recycling of waste is defined as waste recycling within the same product line. In this study, the current state of C&D waste recycling is assessed. With this information, more insight is gained in how high quality recycling can be increased.

The current state of the C&D waste streams in the Netherlands are studied by a material flow analysis. 90% of the C&D waste in 2012 was recycled or incinerated with energy recovery. Merely 11% of the total weight of the waste appears to be recycled within the building sector. The literature study towards re-use and high quality recycling technologies of the three largest C&D waste streams, stony materials, metals and wood, shows that there are several technologies available for this purpose. Therefore, the barriers seems to be in other parts of the system. By means of a qualitative research, the stakeholders in the C&D waste recycling system are asked for their opinion on the current C&D waste recycling system and their view towards future recycling of building materials. In general, the stakeholders concur that sorting of the materials, the economical climate and the type of building materials are the main bottlenecks that withhold high quality recycling. One important solution to these problems is co-operation of the stakeholders in the C&D waste recycling system. The findings of the MFA, literature study and the aforementioned interviews are compared to the outcome of a case study which applied high quality recycling. In this study it is demonstrated that the C&D sector has a huge potential in decreasing material use. However, from this study it follows that a few bottlenecks exist that hamper the increase of high quality recycling.