Sustainable Construction: The Stages and Causes Affecting on Construction and Demolition Waste

The construction industry has a large environmental impact, and sustainable construction has become a key priority on a global scale, resulting in massive construction waste generation, and therefore, the goal of sustainable construction is to reduce natural resource consumption as well as its influence on ecological systems. Sustainable development attempts to raise living standards without jeopardizing environmental quality or future demands. With the growing importance of ecological civilization in construction, the use of energy-saving and environmental-protection materials has become a new focus of the development of the construction industry. Construction and demolition waste could be generated by a variety of activities during various projects. The purpose of the research is to pay attention to the causes of generating construction and demolition waste in each construction stage and rank the important items and stages that lead to the generation of construction and demolition waste. The survey questionnaire concluded that 11 construction stages that may cause construction waste were distributed among 85 civil engineers who have the role of supervision in big construction projects, and 72 questionnaires were collected. The data analysis has been done in SPSS software with the Friedman test. As a result, the findings show that construction suffers from waste material and waste generation in the construction stages. Moreover, the most significant sources of waste accumulation are the stages of planning, storage, design, and procurement. © 1973-2011 IEEE.