Waste in Construction Projects Today's - Practice and Potential

Abstract

This master-thesis is done in cooperation with the SINTEF R&D-project Speed Up. The main goal for the Speed Up project is to increase the efficiency and quality for construction projects. This thesis addresses the possibility to reduce project cost with an increased focus on sustainable construction processes. The idea behind this assignment comes from the previously written project thesis Sørensen (2017), that had a focus on using methodology and ideas from Big Data and control engineering to streamline and support complex construction projects. As a part of this thesis it is done a literature review, a case study and an analysis using data from five real construction projects. The main purpose of the review is to give an overview of relevant literature in the topic of sustainable construction projects. The analysis focuses on what waste actually cost the industry today, and how different handling of waste can increase the efficiency in the industry. The thesis uses methodology from lean projects and laws and regulation towards construction waste in order to give an understanding of project performance and progress.

The main contribution of this thesis is the analysis of waste in construction projects in a sustainable view. It is proposed to use real-time tracking of waste to help decision takers during the projects. These results are based on a relative small amount of sample data from five projects and would therefore need to be verified by a bigger study to conclude on the main findings.