Establishment of an action plan for better recovery of building waste from demolition and rehabilitation operations

The aim of this study was to establish an action plan whose implementation would improve waste management practices in demolition and rehabilitation operations and improve the recovery of waste from these operations in accordance with the hierarchy established by the European regulations in the Waste Framework Directive of 19 November 2008. This study made it possible to establish a diagnosis of the current state of waste management in the building sector and to identify the various brakes preventing better waste recovery. For these brakes, levers for improvement were identified by a literature study, associated with concrete examples of innovative solutions implemented by companies in France. A systemic approach to the building sector was used to identify the brakes and levers for improvement. This macroscopic approach took into consideration all the players in the sector as well as all the phases (upstream and downstream) of a demolition or rehabilitation project. On the basis of the brakes and levers identified, graphs representing the causal links between the brakes and the levers of improvement were drawn up. The superimposition of these graphs made it possible to draw up brake-lever pairs, which together forms the basis for the action plan for improving waste recovery. Being limited to demolition and rehabilitation operations only, the method carried out in this study may also be used in future studies applying this protocol to the entire building sector including also infrastructures. The action plan established in this study could thereby be enriched. The second step will be to put the action plan into practice on a "test" work site and to study the impact of the improvement levers on waste recovery in order to conclude on the relevance of this action plan