Recycling Construction, Renovation, and Demolition Plastic Waste: Review of the Status Quo, Challenges and Opportunities

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Abstract

End-of-life treatment of construction, renovation, and demolition (CRD) plastic waste generated from day-to-day applications of plastics in the construction industry can negatively impact the environment if not handled properly. Addressing this issue is crucial considering the current unprecedented increasing rate of the use of plastics in the construction industry all over the world. Globally, the current option for managing CRD plastic waste is mainly landfill due to inadequate guidelines and standards, avoidance of risk, and lack of knowledge and experience in recycling CRD plastic waste. This trend counteracts the efforts towards a circular economy and crude oil independency. Therefore, developing commercially feasible end-of-use recycling technologies is indispensable to guarantee a sustainable future for the plastics employed in the construction sector. Despite the high theoretical recyclability of the plastics, recycling CRD plastic waste is economically unattractive since the material is contaminated and difficult to sort and separate. In addition, the cost of recycling is hardly recovered because of the material’s low value.

This paper reviews the status quo, technologies, challenges, barriers, opportunities and recent initiatives on recycling CRD plastic waste. The paper identifies the framework and technology modifications required to overcome the current obstacles to implementing commercial-scale recycling. It emphasizes the importance of establishing an effective collection network, imposing price signals by authorities to impress landfilling of CRD plastic waste, and developing policies and regulations to enforce manufacturers to take end-of-life responsibilities by up-designing the product considering facilitated recycling. The paper concludes with a focus on investigating recent global state-of-art measures taken to tackle barriers against CRD plastic waste recycling. This study will assist the plastic construction sector with manufacturing, recycling, policymaking, benchmarking purposes, and implementation considering environmental and economic benefits.

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Plastics recycling: challenges and opportunities.

Jefferson L Hopewell, Robert Dvorak, Edward Kosior (2009)

Plastics are inexpensive, lightweight and durable materials, which can readily be moulded into a variety of products that find use in a wide range of applications. As a consequence, the production of plastics has increased markedly over the last 60 years. However, current levels of their usage and disposal generate several environmental problems. Around 4 per cent of world oil and gas production, a non-renewable resource, is used as feedstock for plastics and a further 3-4% is expended to provide energy for their manufacture. A major portion of plastic produced each year is used to make disposable items of packaging or other short-lived products that are discarded within a year of manufacture. These two observations alone indicate that our current use of plastics is not sustainable. In addition, because of the durability of the polymers involved, substantial quantities of discarded end-of-life plastics are accumulating as debris in landfills and in natural habitats worldwide. Recycling is one of the most important actions currently available to reduce these impacts and represents one of the most dynamic areas in the plastics industry today. Recycling provides opportunities to reduce oil usage, carbon dioxide emissions and the quantities of waste requiring disposal. Here, we briefly set recycling into context against other waste-reduction strategies, namely reduction in material use through downgauging or product reuse, the use of alternative biodegradable materials and energy recovery as fuel. While plastics have been recycled since the 1970s, the quantities that are recycled vary geographically, according to plastic type and application. Recycling of packaging materials has seen rapid expansion over the last decades in a number of countries. Advances in technologies and systems for the collection, sorting and reprocessing of recyclable plastics are creating new opportunities for recycling, and with the combined actions of the public, industry and governments it may be possible to divert the majority of plastic waste from landfills to recycling over the next decades.