Indicators to assess the recovery of natural resources contained in demolition waste.

Demolition waste materials are one of the major industrial waste deposits in many countries and represent an important quantity of potential resources that are not exploited, because the major part of these wastes go to landfill. Indeed, recycling or recovery of demolition waste can reduce the need of primary natural resources. This article gives indicators and a method to analyse demolition waste management with regard to the use of resources contained in these wastes. Demolition wastes are characterized by their contents in energy and raw materials. This content is quantified on the basis of the sum of energy and raw materials necessary for the construction of the building considering the non-renewable character of materials contained in wastes. In fact, this content represents the environmental investment which was necessary to construct the building. An energy balance and a mass balance, with this concept of ;raw material and energy' content, can allow a strategy of waste management to be determined in order to salvage the most important parts of energy and raw materials contained in demolition waste, and so identify the strategy which permits a maximum fraction of the initial environmental investment to be saved. Five waste management scenarios concerning building demolition were assessed with this method and these indicators, and the results are presented in this article.

Choosing a sustainable demolition waste management strategy using multicriteria decision analysis.

This paper presents an application of the ELECTRE III decision-aid method in the context of choosing a sustainable demolition waste management strategy for a case study in the city of Lyon, France. This choice of waste management strategy takes into consideration the sustainable development objectives, i.e. economic aspects, environmental consequences, and social issues. Nine alternatives for demolition waste management were compared with the aid of eight criteria, taking into account energy consumption, depletion of abiotic resources, global warming, dispersion of dangerous substances in the environment, economic activity, employment, and quality of life of the local population. The case study concerned the demolition of 25 buildings of an old military camp. Each alternative was illustrated with different waste treatments, such as material recovery, recycling, landfilling, and energy recovery. The recommended solution for sustainable demolition waste management for the case study is a selective deconstruction of each building with local material recovery in road engineering of inert wastes, local energy recovery of wood wastes, and specific treatments for hazardous wastes.

Experimental percolation under intermittent conditions: influence on pollutants emission from waste.

As a precautionary measure, the re-use (or landfill) of waste requires an environmental assessment of its potential impact. This assessment is usually made by simulating the emission of pollutants with a predictive model based on laboratory tests (standardised batch leaching tests, up-flow percolation tests, acid neutralisation capacity tests [CEN, Characterisation of Waste--Leaching--Compliance Test for Leaching of Granular Waste Materials and Sludges, European Committee for Standardisation (ECS), Brussels, 2002 ; CEN, prCEN/TS 14405 Characterisation of Waste--Leaching Behaviour Tests--Up-flow Percolation Test (under specified conditions), ECS, Brussels, 2002 ; CEN, prCEN/TS 14429 Characterisation of Waste--Leaching Behaviour Test--Influence of pH on Leaching with Initial Acid/base Addition, ECS, Brussels, 2003 ]. These tests are performed with simpler conditions than those occurring in the scenario of re-use (saturated media, permanent inflow ...). In order to evaluate the relevance of these tests to be considered as a reference for predictive model, the purpose of this work is to determine how the intermittent hydrodynamic flow influences the pollutants release of unsaturated waste. As a result, we could estimate whether this parameter should be introduced in the model.