An analysis of factors influencing waste minimisation and use of recycled materials for the construction of residential buildings

Abstract

Residential building construction activities, whether it is new build, repair or maintenance, consumes a large amount of natural resources. This has a negative impact on the environment in the form depleting natural resources, increasing waste production and pollution. Previous research has identified the benefits of preventing or reducing material waste, mainly in terms of the limited available space for waste disposal, and escalating costs associated with landfills, waste management and disposal and their impact on a building company's profitability. There has however been little development internationally of innovative waste management strategies aimed at reducing the resource requirement of the construction process. The authors contend that embodied energy is a useful indicator of resource value. Using data provided by a regional high‐volume residential builder in the State of Victoria, Australia, this paper identifies the various types of waste that are generated from the construction of a typical standard house. It was found that in this particular case, wasted amounts of materials were less than those found previously by others for cases in capital cities (5‐10 per cent), suggesting that waste minimisation strategies are successfully being implemented. Cost and embodied energy savings from using materials with recycled content are potentially more beneficial in terms of embodied energy and resource depletion than waste minimisation strategies.

Design waste mapping: a project life cycle approach

“…Notwithstanding existing endeavours to facilitate on-site waste management improvement and set future baselines to help divert waste from landfill, the state of research is strongly dominated by 'end-ofpipe' issues. Indeed, tools, models and techniques have been developed to handle and better manage on-site construction waste segregation (Poon et al, 2001), waste data analysis (Treloar et al, 2003), waste auditing (McGrath, 2001) and reuse (Emmanuel, 2004). At the end of the waste management (Knoeria et al, 2011;Spoerri et al, 2009) and 'hard' technologies (Osmani, 2013) have been developed as a last attempt to divert construction waste from landfill.…”

“…Bossink and Brouwers (1996) attributed design waste causes to errors in contract clauses or incomplete contract documents. Treloar et al (2003) classified origins of construction waste into preconstruction and construction phases. They reported that during the pre-construction phase, waste occurs during planning and designing (e.g.…”

Post Disaster Waste Management Strategies in Developing Countries: Case of Sri Lanka

“…The site should be selected considering the planned activities such as storing, sorting and processing as well as access by heavy equipment, protection of environmentally sensitive areas and logistical effi ciency. In a disaster situation, it may not be practical to employ a system of waste separation due to amount of debris and time and labor it would require (Treloar et al, 2003;Bekin et al, 2007). According to Selvendran and Mulvey (2005), waste separation system becomes impractical at a post disaster situation as cleanup and recovery became the fi rst priority.…”

Drivers of Housing Demolition Decision Making and the Impact on Timber Waste Management

“…Some of these are already defined in the extant literature including (Mills & Showalter (1999), Pun et al (2006), Begum et al (2006), Treloar et al (2003), Skumatz (2008), Morris et. al.…”