Efficient Recovery of Valuable Resources from Construction and Demolition Waste Towards Circular Economy in Construction Industry—Sustainability Assessment and a Case Study

Abstract

Considerably high amounts of CO2 release to the atmosphere trigger global warming. Although there are several methods to reduce the level of CO2 release, the extent is still very limited and recently-growing awareness of sustainabil-ity/global warming have been pushing the entire construction industry to seek alternative methods for rigorously lowering/eliminating the level of CO2. The key strategic objective of the study is to develop eco-friendly/innovative, 100% CDW-based construction materials and demountable structural systems. This study aims to achieve higher levels of circularity in civil engineering materials/structures, contributing to the reduction/elimination of CO2 emissions much more rigorously through the following key objectives: (i) Upgrading CDW recycling/reuse efficiency by capturing CO2 from the atmosphere to improve properties of CDW-based constituents via accelerated mineralization/carbonation, (ii) Development of holistically-designed advanced material property improvement technologies to even enhance the greenness of 100% CDW-based materials/structures through efficient CO2 binding/elimination capability, (iii) Validation of the ultimate products (materials/structures) with additional green perspective through a detailed large-scale field demonstration. Despite the abundance of studies in this area, there is currently very little work on demonstration activities on the real-time applicability of geopolymers development using industrial by-products and CDWs. Successful outputs of this study and their real-time demonstration will offer a fully sustainable construction system, including speed of construction/design flexibility/air purification/cost reduction/energy and material saving/avoidance of unwanted pollution-heavy demolition processes and make much larger audience to be influenced by the study’s results.