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The presence of hazardous materials hinders the circular economy in construction and demolition waste management. However, traditional environmental investigations are costly and time-consuming, and thus lead to limited adoption. To deal with these challenges, the study investigated the possibility of employing registered records as input data to achieve in situ hazardous building materials management at a large scale. Through characterizing the eligible building groups in question, the risk of unexpected cost and delay due to acute abatement could be mitigated. Merging the national building registers and the environmental inventory from renovated and demolished buildings in the City of Gothenburg, a training dataset was created for data validation and statistical operations. Four types of inventories were evaluated to identify the building groups with adequate data size and data quality. The observations' representativeness was described by plotting the distribution of building features between the Gothenburg dataset and the training dataset. Evaluating the missing data and the positive detection rates affirmed that reports and protocols could locate hazardous materials in the building stock. The asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-containing materials with high positive detection rates were highlighted and discussed. Moreover, the potential inventory types and building groups for future machine learning prediction were delineated through the cross-validation matrix. The novel study contributes to the method development for assessing the risk of residual hazardous materials in buildings., QC 20210825

As global and local visions for sustainable living environments are increasingly supported by policies and concrete practices in construction, the building and housing sector is seeking to mitigate its environmental impact as well as assume a greater social responsibility. The overarching policy objectives set to concretize what a sustainable housing development entails, however, tend to rely on equivocal terminology, allowing a varied interpretation by key industry practitioners. Though in line with an ecological modernization paradigm in policy, the promotion of a market-driven environmentalism in housing faces multiple challenges as varying interests and perspectives collide. Supported by empirical findings of a semi-structured interview study conducted with housing developers in a new ‘green’ urban district in Göteborg, Sweden, theoretical frameworks surrounding the paradoxical path towards a sustainable housing development are presented. Inconsistencies between outspoken ambitions; social dimensions; and the framing of efficiency in new housing are discussed. Possibilities for the housing sector are given in the recognition of new forms of development, where a systemic perspective is required in the alignment between how industry, policy and the market perceives housing development and what is actually sustainable., QC 20171108