Sustainability Assessment of Construction and Demolition Waste Management Solutions

India is facing a major challenge for the proper and sustainable management of C&D waste as its careless handling leads to environmental damage as well as pressure on the natural resources. The embodied energy aspects and the environmental impacts of C&D waste management are often studied, whereas the level of sustainability of C&D waste management strategies is seldom looked into. This study intends to formulate a framework for assessing the sustainability levels of C&D waste management strategies. For this, the parameters that help determine sustainability were identified and assigned their weightage based on their criticality through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The values for the process were obtained from surveys conducted among the subject experts. A total of eight parameters were identified, out of which the global warming potential was found to be the most critical (16.7% weightage) followed by human toxicity potential (15%) and carbon emissions (14.2%). The study intends to address the issue of the absence of a proper method to understand which waste management solution is best suitable for a particular context considered.