**2. Materials and Methods**

In this work, a review was carried out to quantify construction and demolition waste in Colombia. The aim was to obtain the first quantified values of this kind in the country and generate relationships and useful data for future applications and regulations, all with an eye on implementing a circular-economy strategy.

First, an information search was conducted within the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE, according to its Spanish acronym), which is the entity responsible for the planning, collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of official statistics in Colombia [27]. DANE produces a census of buildings in urban and metropolitan areas, reporting the licensed sites, completed projects, projects in progress, and discontinued projects. In this article, all of these areas were considered since it is certain that they all generate waste.

Due to the information available in Colombia, the best strategy for quantifying CDW is to calculate the rate of waste generation based on the area. After obtaining the area of completed construction projects, a volume factor is obtained for transforming units from m<sup>2</sup> to m<sup>3</sup> . A density factor is then obtained to transform m<sup>3</sup> into tons. In this work, several factors from different sources were used in order to obtain the one that best adapts to the available information. The factors that were used to obtain the amount of waste generated were:


**Table 1.** Volume and density factors.


For the experimental phase, sampling was carried out at the construction and demolition landfill facility "La Escombrera" in Medellín, Colombia. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) experiments were conducted using a PANanalytical X'Pert PRO diffractometer (Cu Kα radiation of 1.5406 Å) run at 45 kV, with scanning between 8◦ and 55◦ . Thirty subsamples from different parts of the demolition landfill facility were collected in order to obtain a composite sample of 10 Kg, which was representative of all building debris.
