Recycling and reuse of waste in the construction industry

摘要

Various methods of recycling currently undertaken in the construction and demolition industries are looked at, and concrete is singled out as being a large proportion of construction and demolition waste with few recycling options. It is suggested that a new approach to concrete recycling is required. A recent scheme in Berlin, in which precast concrete panels were reclaimed from a disused building and reused in the construction of a new house, is then introduced. To test the viability of this scheme it was compared to a masonry house as typically built in the UK, in terms of both material costs and CO_2 generated. The study revealed that the Berlin scheme was 59% cheaper than the UK construction method and produced 68% less CO_2.