How to Reduce Waste in Construction

Reducing waste on a construction site saves your organisation money and helps protect the planet by avoiding rubbish going to landfill. There are various preventative steps you can take to minimise the amount of waste your building, renovation, or demolition site creates. Consider these actions to reduce waste on a construction site:

• A strong design – a good design can cut the amount of waste a project produces by using less material with standardised designs that reduce excess off-cuts.
• Efficient ordering – measuring everything to be exact and ordering accurately avoids ending up with excess materials. Regular inventory checks prevent buying extra.
• Buy direct – packaging waste makes up around 10% of construction waste. While packaging is essential to protect materials, going to suppliers direct to buy in bulk offers a solution to avoid individual packaging.
• Minimise mistakes – errors on construction sites cause waste by damaging materials so they can’t be used. Most of these will be accidents but to reduce the chance of mistakes it’s important to carry out a risk assessment and hire competent, skilled, and qualified workers (and supervisors, where relevant).
• Safe storage – protecting your materials from weather conditions and potential theft or vandalism reduces the chance of damage, which may result in unusable materials. This should be in a covered and locked container or location, where possible.
• Recycling bins – ensure bins and storage containers are placed conveniently around your construction site close to the point of waste production. This makes it easy for workers to separate waste and put it in the right container for recycling.

Around a third of the world’s waste is created by the construction industry, which contributes to at least 40% of carbon dioxide emissions for the planet. Constructing and maintaining buildings and infrastructure uses up the most raw materials and resources of any industry. Therefore, it follows that the sector also creates more rubbish than others.

There are various other reasons why the construction industry produces lots of waste:

• Design changes – frequent and last-minute changes to building designs can lead to unneeded materials if they’ve already been ordered.
• Excess ordering – accidentally ordering extra materials may be a safe option but it can result in additional waste at the end of a project.
• Improper handling – a key cause of construction waste is using the wrong handling methods (which can lead to cracked bricks, for example). Improper storage also exposes materials to the elements, which may result in damage and waste.
• External factors – weather effects can create delays to construction and damage materials so they can’t be used.
• Mistakes – general worker mistakes generate waste, whether it’s through accidents or incompetent workers.
• Disposal processes – leaving excess materials on-site, such as scrap metal and concrete, is another big cause of construction waste.

The construction industry contributes to around 23% of all air pollution, 40% of water pollution, and 50% of landfill waste. It’s also responsible for consuming many of the world’s natural resources – including 40% of all raw stones, gravel, and sand, and about a quarter of all new wood produced each year.

Construction industry waste has a big environmental impact too. Most construction waste isn’t biodegradable, so it can take hundreds of years to break down in a landfill. Plus, lots of it classes as hazardous waste that may leach toxic elements into nearby water, ground, and air if it ends up in a landfill site.

Improper disposal of construction waste adds to pollution and CO2 emission levels, which harm the environment. Recycling and reusing as much waste from the construction industry as possible avoids adding to landfill levels and the damaging impact it can have on the environment.