Technical-gate decision support for deploying construction and demolition waste valorization pathways in the built environment

The circular built environment requires reliable routes for deploying construction and demolition waste (CDW) as secondary construction materials, but recovered CDW streams are not interchangeable across applications. This study develops a staged technical-gate decision-support framework for CDW valorization in built-environment applications. Material–processing–application configurations are first screened using non-compensatory engineering, durability, safety and regulatory gates. Only technically released and functionally compatible configurations are then compared using bounded cost, secondary-material utilization and climate-change burden indicators. Finally, deployment is evaluated under governance, quality-retention, allocation, downstream-capacity and shared-feedstock mass-balance constraints. Based on 145 route-specific decision-condition records, 71 records were released and consolidated into 46 technical configurations, of which 27 standardized rows were comparison-eligible. Scenario analysis showed deployable share increasing from 4.71% to 64.89% across governance conditions. The framework supports technically defensible CDW portfolio sequencing without conflating technical admissibility, comparability and deployability.