Assessing the impact of policy tools on building material recovery

Construction materials embedded in existing buildings have unrealized recovery potential. To help realize this potential, governments have implemented policies such as replacing demolition with deconstruction, banning landfilling, and carbon reduction to either force or incentivize resource recovery and circularity. However, the efficacy of these policies has yet to be fully investigated. A novel methodology that quantitatively estimates the potential relative efficacy of such policies is proposed here. At its center is an optimization-based tool recognizing demolition and deconstruction activity precedence relationships that yields the optimal component end-of-life options, extended to include policy levers. Variations of four policy categories were chosen and applied to five building case studies. The results suggest that policy tools can help enforce near-optimal waste reductions and carbon savings that do not necessarily increase net project costs compared to traditional approaches. The effectiveness of these policies varies based on waste and carbon savings measures and building types.