RESEARCH ARTICLE


European Legislation and Implementation Measures in the Management of Construction and Demolition Waste



Paola Villoria Saez 1, *, Mercedes del Rio Merino 1, Cesar Porras Amores 2, Alicia de San Antonio Gonzalez 2
1 Building Technology and Environment (TEMA) Reseach Group, Spain
2 Polytechnic University of Madrid. School of Building Engineering, Spain


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Creative Commons License
© Villoria Saez et al.;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Correspondence: * Address correspondence to this author at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. School of Building Engineering, Spain. Tel: 00 34 913367607; Fax: 0034 913367644; E-mail: paola.villoria@upm.es


Abstract

The intense activity in the construction sector during the last decade has generated huge volumes of construction and demolition (C&D) waste. In average, Europe has generated around 890 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste per year.

Although now the activity has entered in a phase of decline, due to the change of the economic cycle, we don’t have to forget all the problems caused by such waste, or rather, by their management which is still far from achieving the overall target of 70% for C&D waste --excludes soil and stones not containing dangerous substances-- should be recycled in the EU Countries by 2020 (Waste Framework Directive)

But in fact, the reality is that only 50% of the C&D waste generated in EU is recycled and 40% of it corresponds to the recycling of soil and stones not containing dangerous substances.

Aware of this situation, the European Countries are implementing national policies as well as different measures to prevent the waste that can be avoidable and to promote measures to increase recycling and recovering

In this aspect, this article gives an overview of the amount of C&D waste generated in European countries, as well as the amount of this waste that is being recycled and the different measures that European countries have applied to solve this situation.