The following description was taken from Construction and Demolition Waste Management in France by Deloitte:

In 2012, 246.7 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste (CDW) were officially generated in France, as reported by the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy1. It represents a 5.4% decrease compared to 2010 (260.7 million tonnes), but only a 2.5% decrease compared to 2008 (253 million tonnes). The amount of non-hazardous CDW excluding naturally occurring materials (soil) is around 65 million tonnes (sum of below “Other inert waste” and “Non-inert non-hazardous waste”).

Focusing on recovery and recycling of these non-hazardous CDW excluding soil, official statistics show a total of at least 40.4 million tonnes including backfilling in 2012. Taking these generation and treatment figures into account, France 2012 CDW recovery and recycling rate of non-hazardous CDW excluding soil can be estimated to about 63%.

CDW management vary considerably from one site to another and many factors may affect the practices: economic trade-off between outlets, site size and structure, proximity to recovery/recycling and storage facilities, importance of this issue for the client, ethics and importance of the issue for the construction company. Overall, CDW management is an emerging issue, very dynamic in terms of technical innovation, but which suffers from the lack of political will and clients’ interest in general and which also depends heavily on logistics, cost conditions and tax policy. CDW management in France benefits from a powerful legal and regulatory framework: pre-audits on demolition sites, national and departmental CDW prevention and management plans. Nonetheless, it could be enforced more firmly and further developed.