Quantifying demolition fitout waste from Australian office buildings

Construction and demolition waste management in Australia: A mini-review

Construction and demolition activities generate huge quantities of waste with substantial impacts on environment. This mini-review article covers the literatures relating to construction and demolition waste management practice in Australia. The Scopus search engine was used in literature search and 26 journal articles relating to construction and demolition waste management in Australia were targeted for analysis. Additionally, various government acts, regulations, policies, and strategy documents were collected and analyzed. This review indicated that the inconsistencies in legislation and landfill levies across states and territories contributed to the cross-jurisdiction waste movement. Given the stakeholders' attitude and project life cycle, this review reported that the design phase had the greatest potential to minimize waste and that the role of designers had been highlighted in various empirical studies. This review provides practitioners and academics with an understanding of the current construction and demolition waste management research in Australia and recommends directions for future research.

A Systematic Review of Construction and Demolition Waste Management in Australia: Current Practices and Challenges

Construction and demolition waste (C&DW) has a deleterious impacts on sustainability not only in developing countries but also in developed nations. For example, Australia generated more than 27 million tonnes of C&DW in 2018–2019; however, only 60% of this waste stream was recovered. Considering this low recovery rate, lower than many developed nations, and with regards to the increasing rate of C&DW generation, extra attention should be given to the construction and demolition waste management (C&DWM) in Australia. Therefore, this research attempts to accurately understand the current practices and challenges of C&DWM in Australia. To do so, primarily, a systematic review of studies relevant to C&DWM from 2010 to 2021 was performed. In this step, 26 research documents were meticulously analysed to identify the current practices of C&DWM in Australia. Then, an in-depth interview with three experts were undertaken to verify the major results and to investigate the challenges of C&DWM in Australia. The results indicated that three factors significantly affect C&DWM in Australia, namely attitudes and behaviour of C&DWM stakeholders, C&DWM in project life cycles, and C&DWM regulations with regards to sustainability, adding that the latter was revealed as the most effective in C&DWM in Australia.