Exploring reverse logistics of e-waste in civil engineering projects

While being relatively established concepts in other industries, Circular Economy (CE) and in particular Reverse Logistics (RL) have been underexposed in the construction industry. This paper aims at finding a way to implement RL of e-waste in practice in the construction industry, which is a gap in prior literature and to answer the question: What are the factors that influence the transitions between the end-of-life strategies of RL of e-waste and how can these be exploited by RWS? Through a literature study, a conceptual framework has been developed and this framework. Interviews have provided data about the three cases of the Velsertunnel, RITS and the Eerste Heinenoordtunnel, which was compared to the data from the literature in order to form an understanding of the differences. Finally, the initial framework has been refined by including factors from practice based on barriers and enablers. The most important factors that are of influence on the RL of e-waste are that the positive attitude towards CE is not widespread within the organisation and implementation is dependant on the project team, that there is a lack of accessible project data about installations and it is not possible to determine the behaviour and durability and that producers need to be contractually responsible for the RL of their own products Keywords: Circular Economy, Reverse Logistics, construction industry, civil engineering