Eliminating hazardous materials from demolition waste

To achieve optimum environmental and economically feasible recycling of construction and demolition waste (C&DW) materials it is paramount to ensure ‘clean’ (i.e. detoxified) materials. Mixed C&DW requires special treatment and costly disposal of unnecessarily large quantities of materials. A precondition for ‘clean’ demolition waste is careful sorting of the waste at source as an integrated process of the demolition work. This requires that during the demolition process planned and concise sorting of the different materials be carried out, thereby preventing any mix of the waste with hazardous materials, including materials such as asbestos, lead, mercury, PVCs, solvents and adhesives containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Therefore, an initial identification of the presence of these materials in the buildings and structures is required. In this paper examples are given of a hazardous substance, namely PCB, found in buildings.