Reuse and recycle construction materials
In this guide:
- Client's guide to cutting waste from construction projects
- Save costs from your construction projects
- Business leadership to cut construction waste
- Reduce waste in your construction procurement processes
- Reduce waste in your construction supply chain
- Cut waste from smaller construction projects
- Forecast, measure and report waste in your construction projects
- Reduce construction wastage allowances and rates
- Reuse and recycle construction materials
Save costs from your construction projects
Some initial cost-saving steps that clients can take to reduce the waste in any construction project.
The waste created in a construction project can have a major impact on its overall costs, but is often overlooked as inevitable. If you are the client on a construction project, you should ensure that action is taken right through the project, starting at an early design stage, through to post-construction reporting. In particular, you should set clear requirements in the project brief and during design team and contractor procurement.
Construction waste cost saving
There are several areas and steps you can focus on to reduce the amount of waste generated and your overall costs.
- The planning stages are a key area where you can reduce waste and costs. The 'wastage allowance', for example, can be reduced with better planning and design. If you are managing the project, or if you are the client of a project, you should play a key role in instructing your architects or designers about how they can reduce waste in as many areas as possible.
- Using recycled materials in your project can have a significant impact on reducing waste and costs. It is often possible to reuse materials on site - such as excavated materials. These could replace expensive primary materials. Your design team should aim to use recycled materials as much as possible in the early project briefings.
- Waste disposal can also be a significant cost on construction sites. Your design brief should consider the cost of waste disposal as a separate cost, and aim to reduce this as much as possible. By adopting minimum and stretch recovery rates and by forecasting waste quantities, you will be able to manage your waste much more effectively. Material costs can also be reduced by on site segregation and using a more efficient waste recovery service.
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Business leadership to cut construction waste
How clients can place waste management and waste reduction at the centre of their construction projects.
Waste reduction should start at the highest level within your business. If you are the client buying construction services, you should lead by example. One of the key components of your commitment to waste reduction should include reducing waste that goes to landfill.
One simple way of starting this is by creating a statement of intent. For example:
"We commit to playing our part in halving the amount of construction, demolition and excavation waste going to landfill by 2025. We will work to adopt and implement standards for good practice in reducing waste, recycling more, and increasing the use of recycled and recovered materials."
Set a baseline for construction waste reduction
To test whether your business is succeeding in reducing waste in your construction projects, it is important to develop a baseline that future progress can be measured against. This can be achieved by looking at past projects and how much waste these generated over a set period - usually 12 months. You can also work with any businesses in your supply chain to gather this data.
Your baseline should contain:
- how much waste was sent to landfill
- how much waste was generated overall
- how much you spent on your construction projects - for example tender price, excluding VAT
- the recycled content - percentage of materials by value (optional)
Set targets for construction waste reduction
When you have data that can be used to indicate your current waste performance, you can consider what new targets to set. Your business can use one of two common approaches to setting its corporate targets on waste:
- measure your corporate baseline first and then set a target
- set a target based on what your peer group is adopting
As the client on a construction project, it is important to include your baseline information in all policy documents relating to waste management and reduction. This will allow your commercial partners to understand and 91Ï㽶»ÆÉ«ÊÓƵ the commitments your business is making.
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Reduce waste in your construction procurement processes
How clients can reduce overall waste in construction projects through better processes in procurement.
As the client, you should have complete control over the procurement stage of your construction project. This means that you have ultimate control over the targets set to reduce overall waste. Making a commitment at a high level within your business sends a clear message to each contractor that you take waste reduction seriously.
You can use model wording when procuring the resources you need for your construction project. This should cover waste reduction, waste recovery and greater use of recovered materials at all stages of a project including:
- policy
- preparation and design
- pre-construction and construction
- use and post-completion
If you intend to use an external design team for your construction project, you should ensure that the design team you choose has the right skills and the same commitment to reducing waste as you. This also applies to any main contractor you intend to use in your project - see how to reduce waste in your supply chain.
Finally, reporting on waste reduction performance should be a requirement in any contract with your contractors. The reports should show actual performance against the targets you have set.
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Reduce waste in your construction supply chain
How more effective design and planning can help clients to reduce construction waste in the supply chain.
One way that clients can reduce waste from their construction projects is to consult with the businesses in their supply chain as early as possible.
Construction design team and waste
The design team you use for your project can be important in successfully reducing waste. However, as the client, you should set this out as a goal as early as possible.
By focusing on reducing waste at the design stage, you can allow your design team - or potential design teams - to use their own experience and plan in different ways that will use less waste or allow for reusable materials. You could start off by setting this out in your tender requirements for potential design teams.
You should also make reducing construction waste a part of the contract you have with your design team.
For more information for designers, see designer's guide to cutting waste from construction projects.
Construction contractors and waste
While waste reduction can be started at the design stage, you should ensure that your design team communicates their cost saving ideas to any contractors you use. When tendering for contractors, you can take practical steps to ensure waste reduction is a key performance indicator.
For more information for contractors, see contractor's guide to cutting waste from construction projects.
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Cut waste from smaller construction projects
Identifying and reducing waste in small construction projects can be challenging but also cost-productive.
For smaller construction projects - generally projects costing less than £1 million - it is more difficult to implement cost-effective waste reduction techniques.
Key questions you should consider for smaller projects are:
- What are my priorities - since I don't have the time to do in-depth analysis?
- How can I get these benefits with minimum effort?
- How can I check that my project teams are playing their part?
As the client, you can ask your design team to look closely at how waste can be reduced in a number of areas. For example, practical steps can be taken to:
- reuse existing components
- reuse excavated or demolished materials
- avoid unnecessary strip-out and excavation
- select construction materials with higher recycled content
- use more prefabricated construction components
You should consider directing your contractors to use more recycled and excavated materials, and make more use of prefabricated materials to reduce overall costs.
If you have a construction portfolio with multiple small projects you should consider what lessons you can apply from one project to another. You should also consider whether you could share resources between projects for greater efficiency - for example, by using excavated materials from one site to build on another.
You could use the design stage to plan a waste reduction strategy and encourage your contractors to take every opportunity to reduce waste - see how to reduce waste in your supply chain.
On-site segregation of waste may be difficult for smaller projects if there is a lack of space. The waste management contractor should be able to advise the principal contractor on which wastes to separate and which can be cost-effectively sorted off site.
When your project is finished, it is important to assess the performance of your design team and the contractors you have used. A fundamental aspect of your review should be how well - or not - your project handled its waste generating and disposal, and what lessons you can learn to apply to your next project.
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Forecast, measure and report waste in your construction projects
How construction clients can work to forecast, measure and report waste from their construction projects.
Efficient and effective waste management means clients being able to accurately forecast the levels of waste their construction projects will generate. Using a site waste management plan will help you to forecast and manage waste and meet your legal requirements.
Forecasting waste can have significant benefits for your construction project. Applying waste reduction techniques at the earliest stages of your project can deliver higher cost savings. The later stages of your project can then focus on the key waste reduction areas that have been identified.
To be able to accurately forecast the waste in your construction project, your business should develop key performance indicators (KPIs). These will enable you to monitor performance and honour your waste reduction commitment, if you have made one. The KPIs your business could use include:
- tonnes of waste per £100,000 construction value
- tonnes of waste sent to landfill per £100,000 construction value
- percentage of waste diverted from landfill
- percentage of recycled content (by value of materials) achieved
Your business can also use reporting standards that ensure that waste reporting from contractors is relayed back to your business for further analysis.
Working with your design team and contractor
When your design team has completed the waste forecast, your contractor should review it and let you know the actual waste generated. It is important to collect data throughout the construction phase to allow more accurate waste forecasting in future projects. Smaller projects that may not have the logistical set up to make this kind of reporting should be managed more closely by your business.
When your project is complete, you should conduct a waste audit to see how your actual performance matched your forecasts.
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Reduce construction wastage allowances and rates
How construction clients can reduce wastage by negotiation and sharing savings with contractors and suppliers.
When construction materials are ordered, it is normal practice to add wastage allowances. To reduce wastage allowances, you should instruct the design team and contractor (in the tender and appointment documents) to plan how they will reduce the likely wastage rate through better site practice.
Close co-operation between designers and contractors can reduce wastage rates by identifying potential issues at the design stage.
To reduce wastage rates, you should:
- set a requirement for a waste reduction target in the project brief and when appointing the design team and contractor
- ask your design team to reduce the number of different types of materials to be used in the specifications - the fewer types of materials required, the smaller the waste allowance needed
- identify which materials offer the biggest potential waste and cost savings by reducing wastage allowances to good practice levels
- ask your main contractor to discuss wastage allowances before agreeing tender prices with trade and sub-contractors
- monitor waste streams during the project to compare actual wastage rates with the agreed allowance
Wastage rates in small projects
Small projects can limit some of the opportunities to reduce costs. However, clients can still achieve cost savings by:
- identifying the top materials contributing to waste
- discussing with contractors what wastage rates they anticipate on these materials and how these could be minimised
- identifying actions to reduce waste
- checking actual wastage rates by inspecting skips or skip data
For more information, see how to cut waste from smaller projects.
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Reuse and recycle construction materials
How clients can encourage the use, recycling and reuse of materials to reduce overall waste from construction.
By using more recycled and reused materials on your construction project, you can reduce your overall costs. There are two sources of potential cost savings - reusing construction, demolition and excavation materials, and importing recovered and recycled materials.
You should ask your design team to investigate these opportunities at an early design stage. This allows questions to be addressed such as:
- What are the top actions to reuse materials on site and import recovered materials?
- Is space available for materials storage and processing, and what will happen to volumes of waste materials which cannot be reused?
- Will the materials be available in sufficient quantities?
- Will the benefits outweigh the costs? For example, site reuse of aggregates avoids the cost of importing new material, but this must exceed the cost of hiring processing equipment.
The most common applications of reused and recycled products are:
- reusing excavation materials - for example, by stabilising soils using hydraulic binders, or manufacturing quality soils by adding 'green' compost
- processing demolition arisings on site - for example, using mobile crushing plant to provide recycled aggregates for fill, capping and sub-base layers
- importing recycled aggregates that meet the same quality standards as the primary aggregates they replace
- improving engineering properties of materials - for example, by using bonding composites to rehabilitate existing structures
- using products with a high recycled content, such as recycled asphalt or cement replacement in concrete products
Reusing materials in smaller construction projects
Space, time and equipment can restrict opportunities to reuse materials on smaller projects. However, opportunities still exist to import materials from other sites, which may only be available in limited quantities and therefore better suited to small projects - see how to cut waste from smaller projects.
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