This paper deals with the efficiency and sustainability of Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) management in 30 Member States of the European Economic Area (EEA) (the 28 European Union countries plus Norway and Iceland) for the period 2010–2016 using Exploratory Data Analytics (EDA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The first stage of the proposed methodology is EDA with already available (the CDW recovery rate) and suggested indicators (e.g., building stock characterization, dwelling occupancy ratio, macroeconomic ratios and CDW breakdown) to characterize the efficiency and sustainability of CDW management. The second stage is to assess the efficiency of countries using DEA through two original CDW production models, one for sustainability, measuring the efficiency of the construction sector for reducing its CDW, and the second a model to score the efficiency of maximizing the CDW recovery rate. The main outcome of the paper is the proposed methodology, which is a candidate for replacing current indicators in order to evaluate the performance of CDW policy, due to is adaptive nature, promoting the continuous improvement and overcoming the limitations of the poor quality of metrics, data and parametric indicators. The methodology has been experimentally validated using Eurostat data for 30 Member States of EEA, ranking them according to the two DEA model scores, to point out the countries considered efficient among those of their scale, as a reference for sustainable and efficient practices.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.