Mingxue Ma

Engineering


Hi, my name is Mingxue Ma, and I am a third-year PhD student. My principal supervisor is Professor Vivian Tam. My research direction is related to construction and demolition waste management.


Development of a Recycled Concrete Price Model

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The rapid urbanization and significant increase in construction activities have led to the production of massive construction and demolition (C&D) waste. However, C&D waste brings a major challenge to society for its high generation rate and varied composition. It has inevitably consumed land resources and potentially polluted soil and groundwater, because dumping or landfilling is a common treatment. 


Recycling is regarded as an ideal approach to deal with C&D waste. Recycled aggregate from C&D waste could replace part or entire virgin aggregate in concrete. The adoption of market for recycled concrete is slow. Addition to inferior quality, cost is another major factor hindering its wide acceptability. High cost for recycling treatment has caused no price advantages of recycled building materials compared to original materials. There is a need to reduce the cost of recycled concrete for its market to be well-developed. In the promotion of recycled concrete, it is of great importance to estimate the cost to control its price to an acceptable level. 


My project aims to adopt a system dynamics model to observe the impacts of possible factors on the price of recycled concrete over time.