Minimizing C&D Waste through rehabilitation

The Construction and Demolition Waste stream is becoming one of the largest waste streams. With the current attitude of society, this will generate serious problems. Landfill sites will be overloaded; the planet more polluted, and even, in countries were actions are being taken, society might deal with the overload of warehouses and recycled material stock.
To subvert this tendency the waste management should be changed into Integral Chain Management (ICM), not only when designing new buildings, but also when we are dealing with existing building rehabilitations. Supervised by the PhD researcher A. Pereira Roders and P. Erkelens, this paper was developed with the purpose of determining the viability of the Integral Chain Management, normally suitable for new building designs, when reframed for existing building rehabilitations. Hence, the ICM will have to deal with a pre-existence, where a considerable amount of natural resources has already been transformed and assembled without considering dismantling, deconstruction and adapt abilities. To determine the viability of ICM, a scheme was developed were the ICM is adapted to deal with the existing building stock and the different methods to achieve ICM are explained. In conclusion, we can state that ICM is viable theoretically for the existing building stock; however, it may vary according to the design and building.