Natural disasters not only produce an enormous amount of waste, which severely impacts the environment as well as human health but also impedes the construction recovery. While much research has been devoted to waste management during construction, the construction industry needs to identify effective processes to manage the waste generated post disasters. This study utilizes a recent case study of a major earthquake that hit Nepal on 25th April 2015. The earthquake developed more than 3.9 million tons of construction debris in 105 seconds. Thus, the management of such waste is complex and requires innovative techniques. Several steps were taken to research the effectiveness of Disaster Waste Management (DWM); initially conducting a systematic literature review to understand the components of the DWM and identify SWOT elements based on previous identified components, which is the primarily focus of this paper. Based on the identified elements, factors that obstruct the successful implementation of sustainable waste management techniques are then identified, and finally, those elements are validated through gathering survey responses from hundred DWM experts. In the second stage, Interpretive Structural Modeling analysis will be used to find contextual relationships between factors to develop a model that ensures sustainable management of disaster waste.
