Construction and demolition business waste management
When you
are in the game of constructing big buildings, or demolishing them, one of the
keys to sustainability, as well as keeping your costs low, is how well you
manage your business waste.
Let’s
explore that. Not many people would consider that waste management matters
much, given that it is a small part of most businesses, but from a construction
perspective, it matters big time.
When you
consider that many large contracts, particularly government infrastructure
projects, require some sort of environmental reporting as a condition of
engagement, this starts to become clearer.
But what
sort of reporting? How is it measured? And how do we implement systems that get
it right? And how to we encourage our people to use these systems in a way that
means they will deliver the result we need?
All good
and fair questions.
Lets look
at a typical construction site. They will use a variety of materials, many of
which are recyclable, if separated into individual waste streams. This is a
gross over simplification of course, as its easier to say than do. Many might
doubt this but in an environment that values speed, and safety many workers
have been trained to simply clean the site quickly by placing all materials in
the one bin. No on site sorting, no source separation.
The waste
often then goes through a compaction process, or at the very least becomes
jumbled together. There are adhesives, wet cement, tapes, nails, and other
things that can mean that waste can bond together.
If this
happens, once the waste arrives at a sorting centre, recyclables need to be
removed before they can be processed. If they are all jumbled in together, this
manual labor drives the processing cost up considerably. It’s not always
practical and can render a waste stream uneconomic for recycling.
That’s why
when you organize your waste services with a bin hire company, it’s a good idea
to ivest some time beforehand into planning what waste streams you are likely
to generate, thinking about what volumes will be output, and so on. If you can
work out the likely volumes, you can confirm bin sizes and frequencies.
Common
outputs include concrete, timber, plaster, plastic, even bottles and cans, which
are known by the waste industry as commingled recyclables. If you can get a
separate bin for each of these waste streams they become a resource, which drives
the dual benefit of improving your sustainability result, as well as often
lowering the cost of waste management. You are still disposing of the same amount
of products, just doing it differently. And by providing a bin for each, making
it easy for staff to source separate and do the right thing.
You can
also recycle paper, cardboard and documents. Each should go in its own bin, as
they go to different destinations. This is especially true for document destruction – you can put secure documents in the other waste streams but they
wont be destroyed….and is that a risk your business is prepared to take?
Stop by
again soon for more waste and sustainability related posts!
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