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- Creators: Aldaaja, Mohammad
- Creators: Economics Program in CLAS
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
The built environment is responsible for a significant portion of global waste generation.
Construction and demolition (C&D) waste requires significant landfill areas and costs
billions of dollars. New business models that reduce this waste may prove to be financially
beneficial and generally more sustainable. One such model is referred to as the “Circular
Economy” (CE), which promotes the efficient use of materials to minimize waste
generation and raw material consumption. CE is achieved by maximizing the life of
materials and components and by reclaiming the typically wasted value at the end of their
life. This thesis identifies the potential opportunities for using CE in the built environment.
It first calculates the magnitude of C&D waste and its main streams, highlights the top
C&D materials based on weight and value using data from various regions, identifies the
top C&D materials’ current recycling and reuse rates, and finally estimates a potential
financial benefit of $3.7 billion from redirecting C&D waste using the CE concept in the
United States.
This paper examines infrastructure spending in a model economy. Infrastructure is subdivided into two types: one that makes future production more efficient, and another that decreases the risk of devastation to the future economy. We call the first type base infrastructure, and the second type risk-reducing infrastructure. Our model assumes that a single representative individual makes all the decisions within a society and optimizes their own total utility over the present and future. We then calibrate an aggregate economic, two-period model to identify the optimal allocation of today’s output into consumption, base infrastructure, and risk-reducing infrastructure. This model finds that many governments can make substantive improvements to the happiness of their citizens by investing significantly more into risk-reducing infrastructure.