Recycling and demolition at end of life

Following the Green Deal initiative of the European Commission, the construction sector has to shift towards Circular Economy models. Here, mineral construction materials are representing the main waste fraction in terms of volumes. For preparing a future recycling of concrete, first a characterization of the existent mineral stock is needed. In a first approach, Prof. Waldmann researched with her team on a methodology to assess the mineral building stock. Therefore, geospatial and image analysis as well as historic topographic maps are combined allowing to assign buildings to age groups and building typologies. This permits to estimate the mineral stock volume which is currently built-in as well as to estimate for different stochastic scenarios the generation of future mineral construction and demolition waste (CDW) volumes. Although, this methodology is applied exemplarily on the country of Luxembourg, Prof. Waldmann plans to further develop the methodology and to apply it to different construction materials and to different regions/cities in Germany. The estimation could serve representatives and stakeholders as basis for a reliable development of a new Circular Economy concept for the construction material concrete and for construction materials in general.