38% of global emissions come from the construction industry, which is a challenge the sector is actively tackling. For example, a lot of organisations have set themselves stretch sustainability targets in their strategic visions and plans.
Construction companies are also adopting sustainable practices for the planet and their competitive position, and waste minimisation and elimination are vital factors in this journey towards a more sustainable construction industry.
What is waste minimisation & elimination?
Our view of waste is the wasted time, wasted effort and wasted resources within construction. These all contribute towards a construction business’ carbon footprint.
Being proactive in waste reduction is anticipating and minimising waste at every stage of your project delivery and the supply chain, which will significantly reduce your carbon footprint. Our specialists support businesses to carry out waste identification and elimination exercises, on specific and end-to-end processes. This helps businesses develop countermeasures to improve performance. This performance can be quantified in terms of productivity, quality right first time, logistics, manufacturing process waste and streamlining all supporting processes to significantly reduce the environmental impacts.
How does waste minimisation & elimination affect sustainability?
Wasted resources increase your business’s carbon footprint. In all forms, waste increases carbon emissions. Only by reducing waste across the board can construction businesses aim to meet the government’s regulations.
One element of this is getting Quality Right First Time and we aim to provide construction businesses with new skills in quality management and improvement. Our specialists work with your teams to enhance a high-performance Right First Time culture in your workplace. The aim is to put processes in place that drive quality and reduce the need for dangerous reworks. With fewer reworks, comes less wasted energy, comes less carbon emissions.
How can waste minimisation & elimination be more sustainable?
Within improving your organisation’s productivity, creating standardised ways of working is a key method that the UK construction industry can adopt to support and achieve quality and sustainability. BBI work with organisations in implementing clear and optimised manufacturing systems, helping to:
- Optimise machinery and plant set-up times
- Prevent equipment failure
- Increase productivity
- Deploy standardised ways of working that shape a Right First Time approach
Focusing on productivity will heavily contribute towards lowering your business’s carbon footprint. By streamlining your processes, you can minimise your site time and minimise material movements and unnecessary activities.
BBI can also help you to optimise your relationships and handover processes across the supply chain. This means optimised time-sequenced deliveries, executed correctly to the site requirements. This will result in fewer carbon emissions from delivery transportation.
As we move towards industrialisation, the kit-of-parts approach will reduce waste if done effectively.
Reducing waste across your construction business
Focusing your teams on looking at how much of their daily activity is actively adding value to your company and client requirements is key. Are there any common obstacles that are negatively impacting their productivity? In any business, it’s easy for wasteful ways of working to become routine, simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done”.
An approach is to map out current processes and deploy a ‘waste walk’, similar to a safety walk, our specialists walk the process onsite, in the office or at your manufacturing operation working with your team to spot areas of waste.
We aim is to create a workplace culture where staff feel empowered to constructively challenge the ways of working. Implementing such a culture is one of the most crucial steps the UK construction industry can take towards achieving a waste-free, carbon-neutral future.
Waste reduction for the UK construction industry
At BBI we offer our Carbon Flow Analysis which helps your company assess and optimise its carbon footprint at a process level, including waste reduction. If you’d like more information about this process, please contact our specialists: https://share-eu1.hsforms.com/1cXoqMSpQSnqkFzPf9AA98g2dethl