Estimation of Construction and Demolition Waste (C&DW) Generation and Multicriteria Analysis of C&DW Management Alternatives: A Case Study in Spain

Construction and demolition waste (C&DW) constitutes a priority waste stream in the European waste strategy due to its large volume and its high recycling and reuse potential. Directive 2008/98/EC on waste, stresses the need of quantify the waste stream and to improve the material recovery efficiency of C&DW in the European Union. Designing a suitable network of facilities involves an adequate knowledge of the inputs to material recovery facilities. In this work, a two-step methodology for the quantification and waste management analysis of C&DW has been developed and applied to the case study in Cantabria, a northern Spanish region. In the first step, the quantification of C&DW was calculated by means of an equation which combines municipal licenses and ratios of waste per unit area of construction, demolition and renovation. The selected ratios for the study case in Cantabria belong to four northern Spanish regions, and they were developed by two associations of architects, one technological institute and by the regional legislation recently developed in the region. In the second step, the waste management assessment for C&DW was carry out throw the development of a multicriteria-based methodology for decision-making in order to select the most suitable management alternative. The application of the methodology to the case study in Cantabria has been performed using four multicriteria analysis methods: Evamix (EV), Weighted Summation (WS), Electre II (E2) and Regime (REG). Analyses of the sensitivity of the results have been also carried out in order to investigate the robustness of the solutions obtained in the decision making process.