In order to provide the basis for adequate decisions of investors and site owners concerning the deconstruction and re-use of existing buildings and structures on brownfields, TIMBRE's Work Package (WP) 5 will develop tools and instruments supporting decision makers in developing environmentally friendly strategies in consideration of existing national regulations. Furthermore, taking into account that the deconstruction and re-use of buildings, structures and destruction material is not governed in an EU-wide law, recommendations will be developed for the harmonisation and standardisation of handling procedures for the time to come. Therefore, the first task within WP 5 ́s work is to provide a status report on EU wide applied methods of decontamination, laws / regulations for decontamination measures, working safety, re-use and / or disposal. This info rmation will then be implemented in the expert system / information platform provided by TIMBRE WP 1. The data has been collected by an investigation of national laws and practices and through expert interviews with representatives of national institutes and associations as well as people related to the TIMBRE test sites. Deliverable 5.1 summarises the key results of these investigations and points out the legal framework, specific approaches and special needs concerning deconstruction of buildings and re-use of building rubble for several European countries. The countries focused on have been chosen based on their different status and approaches by implementing the EU legislation into national law. Expert interviews have been conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania. Switzerland as a Central European country and not member of the EU as well has been included to see whether the Swiss system is similar to or influenced by the EU wide legislation. The results have been evaluated for each country to show the main issues of legislation and practice. The comparison between the particular countries identifies some common issues, which are working well and states others, which are more or less improvable. Results in a nutshell are: The legal framework, influenced by the European Waste Framework Directive, has been widely established and is working. The laws are constantly discussed and improved. In some countries, the legal aspects are not yet implemented completely, but the process is in progress. Due to the results of the investigations documented in this report, information related to handling of buildings on brownfields is wide spread over different institutions and associations. Often, information is available only in a country’s language. Therefore, one of the most important issues for European improvement and harmonisation would be a general EU-wide improvement of availability of information about methods and legal frame in major EU languages. Furthermore, a lack of acceptance of recycled mineral products has to be observed. The acceptance and market presence could be improved by better information and advertisement as well as support by easy accessible databases and material exchanges. The trade with recycled materials could be simplified by an alignment of approaches for declaration, chemical analysis, quality assurance and environmental requirements on a national as well as on an EU-wide level.