Characterizing the Generation of Building Interior Decoration Waste: A Case Study in Guangzhou City

China has been striving to urbanize in recent years. Accordingly, decoration waste is triggering an enormous challenge to green development if effective management hardly adopted. Authentic statistics or accurate estimation of decoration waste generation can play crucial roles in handle this problem. This study takes Guangzhou city as an example, is designed to understand the generation and flows of decoration waste. The results show that a total of approximately 1.6 million metric tons of decoration waste generated from newly built residential and public buildings in Guangzhou city over the past two decades, and this amount has kept fast growth. Concrete waste and brick account for 78% of the total decoration waste. Moreover, the study found that the total recovery rate of newly-built decoration waste in Guangzhou in 2018 is only 8.6%. Increasing the recovery rate of decoration waste and decreasing the landfill rate can increase the potential economic value of recycling and significantly reduce the land use and potential environmental impact.