An end to rubbish planning

Builders asked to clean up their act

The UK building industry consumes 400 million tonnes of materials each year, a third of which ends up in landfill - or, worse, illegally dumped. In a crackdown on waste, Defra wants construction companies to keep a paper trail of all building materials on projects worth more than £250,000. If such ‘site waste management plans’ become mandatory, construction companies will have to assess how much rubble and waste they’ll produce and how it can be recycled.

Rita Singh of the Construction Products Association welcomes this as “a useful process tool, helping people to plan ahead and getting the manufacturers thinking harder about how materials are delivered and disposed of. With a bit of notice, they’ll be able to say things like: ‘Yes we can deliver at the right time, so your materials won’t sit out in the rain getting wet and damaged.’”

Singh thinks there’ll be a major role in this for consolidation centres, rather than having deliveries (up to 100 a day towards the end of a project) going straight to the site. If they go to a central depot instead, a single vehicle can then transfer just the required materials for that day’s work, at an agreed time. Results from the pioneering London Construction Consolidation Centre already look promising. Opened last year by Wilson James and Transport for London, and the first to handle materials for clients at multiple locations, it’s managing to get 91% delivered undamaged in the right quantity to the right place at the right time (compared with the shocking industry average of under 50%). It has halved trips into central London and, because it allows drivers to unload straight away, it’s saving them an average of two hours each journey. Although that doesn’t factor in the time for a cup of tea…
- Hannah Bullock

Comment on the proposals before 13 July at
http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/construction-sitewaste/index.htm

24 June 2007

Hannah Bullock