BUILDING OUT WASTE

When we think about the homes of the future, we tend to focus on glamorous developments like smart tech and renewables. It’s easy to forget waste, but if we’re serious about overhauling our business-as-usual mindset when it comes to homebuilding then we need to look at this area. It’s crucial to the goal of building sustainably, and as an added bonus, it might help us to keep our builds within budget too.

First thing’s first: the term ‘waste’ should be understood to refer to a home’s unnecessary or ‘badly’ designed features as much as it does to over-packaged building materials and site waste. Get something wrong at the design stage, and you have built in waste for the lifetime of the house. We also need to consider the embodied carbon of the materials we use. Here I’ll look at all aspects of managing waste, from dealing with site waste and packaging to avoiding wasteful design decisions and re-using materials.

Managing site waste

It’s a good idea to have a plan for dealing with site waste. Building projects produce large amounts of waste; in fact, as much as 12% of materials delivered to site are thrown away unused. Knowing how to handle building materials correctly is one of the keys to effective management.

Excavation and foundation waste is routinely dealt with using specialised muck-away lorries, some of them with grabs. Skips are primarily used for waste generated above ground, but many builders use their own flat-bed tipper