Incentive or Punitive Measure? Analysis of Environmental Regulations in Construction and Demolition Waste Recycling

In order to investigate the formulation of appropriate environmental regulations in construction and demolition waste (CDW) recycling, this paper establishes a CDW recycling decision-making system consisting of a contractor, a developer, and the government and analyses the decision-making results and influencing factors of the various stakeholders. Three different types of environmental regulations have been considered in the model: (i) no regulation, (ii) incentive regulation, and (iii) punitive regulation. The research shows that the incentive regulation offers the constructor greater incentives to recycle CDW and yields higher profits for members of the system, and however, when recycling is very costly and CDW is highly damaging, punitive regulation should be implemented, as the incentive regulation leads to lower social welfare. In addition, governments should be more cautious when adopting incentive regulation, because social welfare may be negative under this condition whereas there is no such possibility under the punitive regulation.