Urban mining potential in Serbia: Case study of residential building material stock

Abstract

As governments worldwide attempt to develop sustainable waste management strategies, massive amounts of waste have been accumulating. However, developing an effective waste management strategy requires a thorough understanding of waste types and quantites. The existing efforts to identify waste flows in the built environment are unsuitable for countries with non-reliable statistics as they mostly use location-specific parameters such as data on construction, renovation, demolition activity, and generation rates from the literature. The types and quantities of materials embedded are rarely considered. This study aims to fill the identified gap by estimating the quantities of different material types embedded in Serbian residential building stock. It will do so by calculating the volume and weights of building elements and their materials using information from a detailed building stock typology. The results show that the amounts of materials embedded vary significantly from district to district, ranging from 10 in Toplička District to 96.9 million tons in Belgrade. The mineral materials are the highest contributors to the material embedded, implying that future waste management strategies should focus on them. Apart from the formulation of location-specific circular economy and waste management strategies, these results may be useful for planning energy efficiency retrofitting activities, deconstruction and reversible design strategies.