Construction and demolition waste (C&DW) contribute to approximately 30% of the total waste generation worldwide, by which heterogeneous ecological impacts, such as resource depletion, global warming, and land degradation, are engendered. Despite ongoing research efforts to minimize construction waste via the Building Information Modeling (BIM)-aided design, there is a paucity of research on integrating BIM in demolition waste management (DWM). This study investigates prominent barriers and future research directions toward the wider adoption of BIM in C&DWM by conducting a systematic literature review. First, this study identifies the barriers that hinder the implementation of C&DWM in Australia; then, it explores the benefits and challenges of leveraging BIM applications for C&DWM. The findings suggest that, for existing buildings without up-to-date design drawings, it is imperative to improve the accuracy of data capturing and object recognition techniques to overcome the bottlenecks of BIM-DWM integration. Moreover, the development of regional-oriented material banks and their harmonization with life cycle assessment databases can extend the potential of BIM-based sustainability analysis, making it applicable to the DWM domain. This study proposes a research agenda on tackling these challenges to realize BIM’s full potential in facilitating DWM.

Addressing the sustainability issues arising from construction and demolition waste management (DWM) has gained little traction due to the lack of incentives, stringent regulations, and systematic guidance. This study aims to empower systematic decision-making concerning DWM alternative selection by developing a sustainability assessment framework by coupling a modified Delphi method with the multicriteria decision analysis technique. First, the study identifies a comprehensive inventory of indicators across three dimensions of sustainability in the context of DWM. Next, the study combines a modified Delphi method with the analytic hierarchy process to validate and prioritize the selected sustainability indicators. For the first time, insights regarding the DWM sustainability indicators from China’s construction industry practitioners’ perspectives are elicited using a mixed method comprising online semistructured interviews and two rounds of questionnaire surveys. Experts participating in the research are mostly based in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, where local governments exhaust all efforts in promoting carbon-neutral and sustainable development. The findings reveal that eight sustainability indicators were regarded as the determinants for the sustainability performance of DWM, with the global warming potential (32%), energy efficiency (16.1%) and land use (13.5%) receiving the highest preference scores (weights) based on the experts’ judgment. Notably, the economic factors like the total cost (6.54%) appeared not highly prioritized by the local experts as typically did in the previous studies from developing countries.

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