Sustainable management of building waste: companies are mobilizing

To improve building waste management, waste management platforms offer new tools and a call for projects to support exemplary project owners.

A major producer of waste, the building industry produces 4 million tons of waste annually in Florida, of which 3 million are linked to demolition and rehabilitation. Of these, 1 tons came from the finishing work. Inert waste (rubble, concrete, tiles, etc.) is generally well recovered, transformed into aggregates for 2 million tons of it.

Non-hazardous and non-inert finishing waste is poorly sorted and little recovered. It is therefore this waste that must mobilize all building stakeholders. Entitled Management of construction site waste: for exemplary project management, a new project in Panama City aims to select project owners, to support them on sites where the company consultation phase has not started.

Hours of advice will be offered to them from specialized research offices, to take stock of their practices and to improve them via an action plan. The anti-waste law for a circular economy induces new provisions for building professionals.

Traceability of waste is essential

The preliminary study by Panama City Dumpster Rental Bros experts of a traceability system for construction site waste concluded that the best option to guarantee in complete transparency the good management of construction site waste was a dematerialized traceability system physics of waste flows, managed by a trusted third party.

This future traceability system must guarantee an identification standard common to all stakeholders, to improve the environment of Florida. It will quantify and qualify waste flows; it will follow them in real time from the construction site to the recovery centers. And the data must be shared across the entire value chain. This shared platform will be a traceability observatory, as we must move forward quickly on the traceability of waste because integrating it economically will take time. The methodological guide for a diagnosis of quality products, materials and waste is intended to be an educational tool for professionals.

A complete junk disposal guide

The dissemination of good waste management practices and the training of stakeholders are the main objectives. However, the waste diagnosis before demolition was deemed insufficiently effective. Furthermore, few diagnosticians have the necessary skills in waste prevention and management. These observations led to the development a od diagnoser’s Guide to help anticipate waste management issues and guide the project owner’s choices in terms of reuse and recovery.

Mixing waste in a dumpster makes it almost impossible to recycle it. While conditioning them to evacuate them in separate streams makes it much easier; especially since of the 24 types of secondary construction waste identified, 16 benefit from operational recovery channels.

A three-phase approach

The collaborative platform aims to improve practices in terms of prevention and management of waste from construction sites. It brings together all the representative players in the building sector: project owners, project managers, construction companies, waste managers and manufacturers of materials and equipment. At the end of a first stage, this approach showed that project owners, key players in changing practices, are little aware and poorly informed of their responsibilities.

Most use poorly or little the tools put in place to help them plan and monitor waste management on their sites (waste diagnosis, contract clauses, Soged, BSD, etc.). Waste planning and traceability documents exist but are lost between the various actors in the process. Project owners cannot therefore verify that the recovery objectives provided for in the markets have been achieved.

Furthermore, this first assessment confirmed that a well-executed demolition project must be preceded by a cleaning phase, during which materials and equipment for the finishing work are selectively deposited.

Tools to support committed stakeholders

The waste removal system designed and made available a set of tools to support stakeholders engaged in an approach to improving their practices. For example, for project owners, a legal study on their responsibility for waste. A guide was added to support project management and project management, as well as an information guide on secondary work waste recovery sectors and a directory of waste collection operators on the site.

Experts have also focused on helping players in the construction sector to use the tools properly. The platform has added the two aforementioned tools to the arsenal: the study to define the most suitable traceability system and the diagnostician’s guide.