Soon, Danes will have to sort and reuse while they tear
Denmark is taking a major step towards increased recycling of the 5 million tonnes of construction waste that the construction industry emits annually.
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Selective demolition is coming
Most of this construction waste comes from the rehabilitation and demolition of existing buildings, and the aim of the scheme is for a much larger proportion of the usable materials to be recycled or recycled, while hazardous waste is sorted out for safe treatment.
Selective demolition defines as «demolition of materials from built skills and source sorting in such a way that one gets maximum utilization and recycling of materials. That the entire building is demolished first and then sorted out materials is not to be regarded as selective demolition “, explains the Danish Ministry of the Environment – The Danish Environmental Protection Agency.
The Danish construction industry has received five reports from the authority which will form the basis for the new rules. Here, 129 different schemes are proposed that cover all areas of selective demolition and increased recycling.
Reported people conclude that the legal requirement should cover all buildings that are completely rehabilitated or demolished, but it is possible that the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the construction industry will be the only ones on a lower limit, for example an exception for buildings under 250 square meters.
To the online newspaper BygT, the Danish Environmental Protection Agency says that in dialogue with Danish construction to ensure that the requirement to reduce the need for industry and execution in practice.
Norway recycles 40 percent
Recently, Enova launched three smaller support schemes for the reuse of building materials. These must support mapping and design in reuse projects.
According to the technical director of the National Association of Construction Products, Trine Dyrstad Pettersen, the construction industry in Norway accounts for about 26 percent of the total fall in Norway – a total of 3.2 million tons of waste, and on average only 40 percent of this construction waste is recycled into new materials.
In its consultation statement for the revision of the Technical Regulations, Asplan Viak has previously proposed that the requirement for sorting construction waste should be much higher than 70% by weight as proposed in the revision of the regulations. Today, the requirement is 60 percent.
– In order to increase the possibilities for handling the waste downstream, the material must actually be recycled 70 percent, the requirement for sorting at the construction site should be much higher, at Lyche.
Group leader Cathrine Lyche in Asplan Viak stated in 2021 that sorting on a construction site is not the same as material recycling.
– Almost everything that is sorted today goes to energy recovery – not to recycling. We believe that there must be requirements for registration of materials for material recycling, in addition to reuse.
The Directorate for Building Quality has proposed that the requirement for a waste plan for more than 10 tonnes of waste must also be integrated into buildings, not just structures and facilities.
– In Asplan Viak, we believe that 10 tonnes is too much and that the limit could have been even lower, Lyche said.
According to Lyche, it is important to have different waste plans for demolition and for construction work, and she claimed that it is a shortcoming that the regulation does not require a maximum amount of waste in kg per square meter for construction work.