Construction and demolition waste management – a System Dynamics perspective: MINEA WG 1: “Resource potential of construction & demolition waste”, 14-15 Dec 2017, Vienna, Austria.

Different policies of the UK Government have been initiated to improve the recovery of the Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW). Various models have been developed to analyse the impact of these policies which are classified as disciplinary or multidisciplinary models comprising variables related to technology, economic, and climate. While being multidisciplinary, these models have limitations in simulating the complexity of the CDW recovery. As a socio-technical problem, this research aims to develop a System Dynamics (SD) model to analyse profiles of CDW recovery considering the interrelationships among these influential variables. The SD model is proposed to utilise the hard and soft data incorporated in the CDW processes with due cognisance to the inter-dependencies of variables that are involved in addition to mental judgement of the experts and industry practitioners. The proposed model can be used to test the effectiveness of each initiative based on the most recent statistics released and provide policy makers with a decision making tool upon which different scenarios regarding CDW recovery policies can be tested before implementation.