A Life Cycle Assessment model of End-of-life scenarios for building deconstruction and waste management

International audienceThe end-of-life of buildings is increasingly involved to improve waste management and environmental concern of the construction sector. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model is suggested in this paper to holistically estimate environmental impacts of the end-of-life of any building. The model allows to consider on site works (i.e. machines, workers …), 40 waste types and 7 waste treatments, with potential benefits from recovery. The model, which is parametric, can be easily instantiated for any building and for different end-of-life strategies (e.g. demolition or deconstruction, reuse or recycling). It can be used as a decision aid by engineers to plan the deconstruction or demolition of a building considering the environmental impact of this process. This model is applied to different real-life cases. The results show that the impacts and therefore the best scenario (i.e. the one that minimizes the environmental impact) are highly case-dependent; for example, deconstruction does not perform better than demolition for all criteria and case studies. This demonstrates the value of a parametric model that can be effective and easily applied to different buildings and strategies