Waste reduction final report -4 - Test Input

Discussion
Treatment of the main construction waste materials is well advanced in Switzerland with a
total recycling rate of about 80%. It seems that a further reduction of primary gravel use can
only take place when the growth rate of new constructions will decrease. This process is
sometimes called “from stock growth to stock management” or “from waste management to
resource management”.
However, it has to be recognised that the recycling rate is much lower in house building than
in civil engineering. Material diversity and therefore the recycling or reuse challenges are
huge when examining a building. A next step to make (building) construction waste more
sustainable would be to identify appropriate materials and (new) technologies for treatment.
Recycling of PVC materials is one positive example for this. It shows that considerable
knowledge is already there; efforts to bring it to the respective people should be intensified.
Sadly enough, helpful web pages such as www.ecobau.ch are not used by many planners and
clients, even if it provides useful information to mitigate construction waste.
Bottom up or top down, this is a well-known question when thinking about implementing
sustainability. There have to be used both approaches in order to speed up new treatment
ways of construction waste and to avoid waste in construction design. This process is still
very slow in Switzerland, so that future work should concentrate on identifying important
boosters to accelerating it. On the one hand, authorities can serve as exemplars or can point
out the importance of sustainability. They can be supported by an adequate legal frame and
decreed laws e.g. to prohibit landfilling of certain materials. Though, as to my opinion, laws
and regulations can’t be the most important drivers of sustainable construction waste
handling. Possibilities to bypass them are large in this industry. However, they are very
important in order to give signalling effects, to start discussions on the topic and to lead waste
handling in defined direction. [Lichtensteiger 2006] even suggests incorporating structures as
resource users and resource donors in regional and national cadastres.
Today, the awareness for sustainable construction waste handling and sustainable
construction is very low among planners, clients and other people. Like in other sectors,
information about these topics should be brought to the population (don’t forget that 2/3 of all
investments in construction engineering are made by private awarding authorities). Ideally,
this would establish a certain force on planners and raise the willingness to include life cycle
costing into calculations for a new structure or in refurbishment works.
Companies do what is profitable, this is how reality works. An important instrument in this
view is Life Cycle Costing – a way of looking at a product’s life cycle taking into account
external and extra costs, e.g. emerging for renewal of material parts. This is also what could
convince private people to include sustainable considerations when planning a building.
However, high costs at the beginning of a building’s life can be an obstacle to include all
sustainable thoughts. Financial support by the cantons (which is today already partly given)
could help to mitigate this problem.
Furthermore, planners have to be reached in a much broader manner. Apparently, in
Switzerland today only very few architects take construction waste handling into their
considerations. Admittedly, complexity of construction materials is high and many other
points have to be thought of in planning. In addition, recycling construction materials or wellseparable
materials are not always available in a reasonable distance. This fact was also
recognised when buildings were made following the MINERGIE-ECO® guidelines: All in
all, it can’t always be claimed that such a building is more sustainable than another, this e.g.
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