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Brazil, as a result of economic development and strengthening of the construction industry in recent years, is generating an increasing amount of construction and demolition waste (CDW). Hence, environmental assessment of the management systems is vital. A life cycle assessment (LCA) is presented of CDW management in a medium-sized municipality located in the southeast region of Brazil, where the impacts of leaching were not considered due to absence of consistent data. Six different proposed scenarios for the current CDW management situation have been considered. These scenarios comprised the combined use of landfilling, sorting, and recycling, and the use of CDW as paving material for landfill roads, in different percentages. Considering 0.8 ton of waste as the functional unit, the life cycle inventory was performed using primary data obtained from field survey and secondary data from the database Ecoinvent version 3.1, and from the literature. The method CML 2 baseline 2001 was used for environmental impacts evaluation. The results highlight that recycling is beneficial when efficient CDW sorting takes place at construction sites, avoiding the transport of refuse to sorting and recycling facilities, and the distance between the generation source and the recycling unit is within 30 km. Thus, our results are helpful to ensure that the decision-making processes are based on environmental and technical aspects, and not only on economic and political factors, and also provide data and support for other LCA studies on CDW.

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Fiscal economic instruments are one of the main mechanisms to improve the management of construction and demolition waste (C&DW), and the establishment of specific disposal fees is one of the most effective practices. This study analyzed the influence of increasing C&DW disposal fees considering a municipal management system. The environmental profile of the current scenario and the proposed scenarios, designed in accordance with the adoption of economic fiscal instruments, were determined through life cycle assessment. The results indicated that the scenario proposed for 2030 (350% increase in disposal fees compared to 2017) has the lowest environmental impact, indicating the potential benefits of using tax instruments.