A dynamic model for assessing the effectiveness of construction and demolition waste management

Abstract

It is widely accepted that a huge amount of waste is produced by construction activities every year throughout the world. This waste not only depletes finite landfill resources and contaminates the environment, but it also harms society. To help deal with the increasingly severe problems of waste generation in the construction industry, a plethora of studies have investigated construction and demolition (C&D) waste management. However, none of them developed a tool for assessing the performance of any given C&D waste management process. This study used a system dynamics (SD) approach to examine the relationship of three measures of performance (economic, environmental, and social) that underlie the key variables of waste management practice. A literature review was conducted to identify the key variables, which the iThink SD simulation program then converted to stock-flow diagrams. The resulting model was validated using data collected from a construction project in China. This study contributes to the body of waste management knowledge by having produced a holistic dynamic model that not only provides an improved understanding of how C&D waste management activities are dynamically influenced by the interactions of key variables, but is also capable of providing solutions for effectively controlling such variables.