Paper Title
Decision Making on Reverse Logistics In the German Construction Industry

Abstract
Demolition and construction wastes make about 52 percent of the total generated wastes in Germany and is overall the biggest cause of wastes. Therefore this type of waste has a high impact on the construction industry and the strategy of waste handling belongs to the management of the companies. In Germany different waste management methods such as recycle, reuse, remanufacture and landfill are used. This paper focuses on the decision making about the choice which of the available waste management methods will be used. A questionnaire survey was created to collect necessary data in the German construction industry. Exploratory factor analysis was done to extract key factor influencing the reverse logistic decision. Structural Equation Modelling was then performed to examine the causal relationships of the extracted factors. The four key factors are Management, Investment, Costs and Constraints. The results show that the most important factor are the Constraints. The factor Constraints consist of many items including legislative pressure, site space, availability of landfill, possibility to replace virgin material with wasted components and the level of knowledge of sorting. The factor constraints cannot be influenced by the management or only with a high effort and need of time.Another important finding is the high influence of the factor Management on the factor Cost and factor Investment. As the management of companies makes decisions in terms of budgeting and cost controlling, those decisions influence the amount of costs in a significant way. Additionally all investment decisions are made by the management. Keywords- Construction Industry, Decision Making, Reverse Logistic, Waste Management