Estimation and forecasting of concrete debris amount in China

With the rapid economic development in China, the resource shortage and environment pollution have become more and more serious. Construction business, as one of the main industries, consumes a great deal of natural resource, and at the same time induced mass of civil engineering waste (CEW). Recycling CEW cannot only effectively deal with the pollution problem of environment, but also greatly decrease the consumption of natural resource. In order to get a quantitative cognition about concrete debris (CD), this paper estimated the quantity of CD based on the annual cement production and the building areas respectively. The approach based on cement production is suitable to estimate the total quantity of CD. The approach based on building areas is proper to estimate the quantity of CD in building construction. The future quantity of CD is also forecasted. The established Gray forecasting model is used to estimate future building areas. And a time series forecast of GDP is used to estimate future cement production which is used to estimate the rate of rubble development. The results indicated that the quantity of CD in 2000 reached 88 million metric tonnes in China and the annual increasing rate will be more than 8% in future.