Page 24 - New Trends in Eco efficient and Recycled Concrete
P. 24
Construction and demolition 1
waste
2
1
Jorge de Brito , Francisco Agrela and Rui Vasco Silva 1
1
CERIS-ICIST, Instituto Superior Te ´cnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal,
2
Construction Engineering Area, University of Cordoba, Leonardo Da Vinci Building,
Rabanales Campus, Cordoba, Spain
1.1 Introduction
There has been a considerable investment in the construction sector as a result of
the economic growth in several countries, particularly China, India and Brazil. This
has led to a worldwide increasing demand for construction aggregates (Freedonia,
2012) and, thus, has encouraged the ongoing extraction of natural resources with
severe environmental repercussions. Recent statistics showed that the global
demand for aggregates was expected to increase from 45 billion tonnes, in 2017, to
66 billion tonnes by the end of 2025 (PMR, 2017) thereby demonstrating their
substantial role in the construction industry.
Conversely, this sector is also responsible for the heaviest and most voluminous
waste stream when compared to other main economic activities (De Brito and
Silva, 2016; Silva et al., 2017). In China, the estimated amount of construction and
demolition waste (CDW) was about 2185 million tonnes in 2011 (Lu, 2014), but
other sources suggested that, in that same year, it was somewhere between 600 and
800 million tonnes (Duan et al., 2015). In India, a report released in 2010 stated
that the amount of CDW produced annually was 10 12 million tonnes, correspond-
ing to 8.3 10.0 kg per capita per year (MEF, 2010). However, for the city of
Chennai alone, the amount of CDW produced corresponded to about 175 kg per
capita per year (Ram and Kalidindi, 2017), revealing a considerable discrepancy. In
the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated the generated
amount of CDW in 2014 to be around 484 million tonnes (USEPA, 2016). In the
European Union, in 2014, this value was of 868 million tonnes, accounting for 35%
of the total amount generated in all economic sectors (Eurostat, 2017). It is clear
that the inconsistency in some of this data may have been due to insufficient waste
management policies, undeclared values or uncontrolled operations, leading up to
misrepresentative indicators. Nevertheless, the trend regarding the considerable
quantities of CDW generated worldwide is still very much real, thus, demonstrating
the considerable urgency to take further action to incorporate greater amounts of
beneficiated CDW in current construction practice and close the loop of the supply
chain (De Brito and Silva, 2016).
New Trends in Eco-efficient and Recycled Concrete. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102480-5.00001-4
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
