CONSTRUCTION AND DEMOLITION WASTE: LCA OF 51 RESIDENTIAL BUILDING DEMOLITION

Abstract

The management of the construction and demolition waste in the building sector was subject of the recent new European Directive 2008/98/CE which implies, within 2020, the recycling of at least the 70% of the material weight at the end of life. About the 84% of the Italian buildings are residential and the 65% of them were built between 1945 and 1990; for this reason, they are characterized by a remarkable technical and functional obsolescence and they probably will undergo to demolition or completely refurbished in the next few years. In this contest, we conducted an environmental assessment (LCA – Life Cycle Assessment) of the demolition and disposal phases of 51 residential buildings in the village of Case Nuove, in the municipality of Somma Lombardo (VA), close to the Malpensa airport. The analysis of the demolition process demonstrated the possibility to carefully select the materials, to allow the distinct final treatment of the whole waste amount, and evidence the predominance of the inert materials (97.2%).
Therefore, the demolition waste management of the common buildings depends on the final treatment of the inert materials: if they are sent to the recycling, the percentage set by the rule is automatically overtaken, otherwise the standard target is impossible to achieve. The choice of 1 m2 of residential gross floor area highlighted very low values of the environmental impacts resulted from the demolition and the final disposal, particularly about the embodied energy, about 4 kWh/m2.