Obstacles and Challenges that Leads to Failure in Implementation of 3R Practices in Malaysian Construction Industry

The development of construction project keeps increasing until leads to amount of construction waste issue increasing from year to year. The waste management practice through 3R Practices has recommended to implement towards sustainable waste management and reducing the construction waste issue. The aim of this research is to determine the obstacles and challenges that leads to failure in implementation of 3R Practices in Malaysian construction industry. There are also few research objectives including to explore the importance of 3R Practices and to identify the degree of awareness of construction waste issue and waste management among different construction professionals in Malaysian construction industry. The data collection for this research study is conducted through questionnaire survey and it targeted the construction professionals that works in Selangor’s construction firm including architect, engineer and quantity surveyor as respondents. It has successfully get back the feedback from 80 respondents. The data collected is then analysed to determine the level of agreement towards the information related to objectives based on respondent’s perception and opinion. Based on questionnaire survey, the importance that identified as top five include reducing global warming issue, reducing the environmental pollution issue, conserving the natural resources, reducing the activities of extracting raw materials in producing new construction products and discovering the unused materials on the construction’s project site. Not only that, the obstacles and challenges in implementation of 3R Practices that evaluated as top five through questionnaire survey are habit of using landfill in settling the construction waste, lack of knowledge towards 3R concept, lack of enforcement towards 3R Practices as compulsory in construction by government, lack of space as well as time constraint for waste segregation process. Therefore, these obstacles and challenges should be take noted by the government and local authority to enhance the implementation of 3R Practices in Malaysian construction industry towards construction waste reduction.