Construction and demolition waste disposal charging scheme design

Abstract

Construction and demolition waste disposal charging is a critical component in construction waste (CW) management. Over the past few decades of implementation around the world, the effectiveness of waste disposal charging in decreasing negative environmental impact is gradually being questioned. This paper identifies two intertwined issues that have not attracted sufficient attention in actual practice. One is the consideration of contractors’ behavior, which is economically driven. Another is the influence of waste transportation, which is also a major stream of environmental pollution. These two aspects significantly affect the effectiveness of the waste disposal charging scheme. Contractors may not transport their generated CW to appropriate disposal facilities. They make decisions based on the disposal and transportation cost. To address this problem, this paper proposes a general construction and demolition waste disposal charging design methodology in which contractors’ behavior and the influence of waste transportation are taken into account. A mixed-integer programming model is developed for the optimal design of the charging fees, which analytically formulates both of the abovementioned aspects. Furthermore, we developed a model that partially modifies the current charging scheme to better fulfill the environmental protection objective. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed methodology can effectively change contractors’ waste disposal decisions and significantly decrease the negative environmental impact of construction and demolition waste. This study contributes to a new perspective to better design the construction and demolition waste disposal charging scheme and has a wide range of applicability.