LCA Modeling of Cement Concrete Waste Management

Abstract

Valorization of construction and demolition wastes (CDW) has become a fundamental issue in Europe, due to the huge amounts generated every year. Choosing an appropriate destination among several destinations for such wastes requires a global environmental assessment that can be provided by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Recycling is one of the waste handling practices whose environmental performances can be assessed by several methods in LCA. Among those methods, system expansion and cut-off methods are currently the most used methods, which were investigated in this paper to handle recycling of cement concrete demolition waste (CCDW) in LCA. Therefore, a case study was defined as waste management of a specific amount of CCDW for landfilling or for producing aggregates for road pavement construction. Results of the analysis showed that methods provide different results for the same problem. Overcoming this methodological problem of identifying actual environmental consequences requires developing a waste management model by taking into account the economic demands for the main co-product of the quarry process in the markets