Identifying and Assessing Influence Factors on Improving Waste Management Performance for Building Construction Projects
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 135, Issue 7
Abstract
Environmental sustainability has become one of the key drivers for continuous growth in the construction industry. Many project practitioners face challenging circumstances in finding an effective way to prevent pollution and minimize wastes by making the best use of the increasingly scarce natural resources. However, most of these efforts are focused on planning and/or design strategies; therefore, they fail to thoroughly cover the environmental issues based on the construction execution level. Further, there is a lack of quantitative measurement system and management-level guidance. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a new methodology that assists project managers to assess the performance level of a project in terms of waste management practice. This study is based on a two-pronged approach. One is the identification of the waste management influence factors that play an important role in decreasing waste and increasing recycled materials on construction sites. The other is the development of an assessment tool to measure the level of waste management performance for a particular project. As a result of this work, 59 factors were identified and an assessment tool was developed based on quantification of these factors. The tool has been proved to effectively measure waste management performance throughout four real-case validity tests. From the industry perspective, this paper contributes to establishing the environmentally sustainable production systems by providing the project stakeholders with an established set of influence factors and with a diagnosis tool for measuring their current performance. Additionally, project owners can use the output of the tool, especially the total index score, as a measure to benchmark the level of waste management for continuous improvement.
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Acknowledgments
The writers would like to thank many individuals who participated in the survey and anonymous reviewers for detailed and helpful comments. This work was supported by Sustainable Building Research Center at Hanyang University sponsored by the SRC/ERC Program of Ministry of Science and Technology in Korea (MOST) (Grant No. R11-2005-056-03004-0).
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 135 • Issue 7 • July 2009
Pages: 647 - 656
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Jun 27, 2007
Accepted: Jan 21, 2009
Published online: Jun 15, 2009
Published in print: Jul 2009
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