Assessment of Construction Waste Generation at Building Sites: Site Survey, Categorization and Percentage Analysis

This paper presents a site-survey method for measuring construction waste at building sites and expressing it as category-wise percentages. Waste is sorted at source into ten categories (concrete and mortar, bricks and blocks, tiles, steel, timber, plastics and packaging, plaster and gypsum, glass and aluminium, paint and chemicals, soil and other), weighed on site across three construction stages, and analysed for percentage share, waste generation rate per m² of built-up area and material wastage percentage. Published studies show compositions ranging from masonry-dominated to timber-dominated depending on construction system, and Indian national estimates of C&D waste vary by more than an order of magnitude, which shows the need for site-level data. A worked example with placeholder figures illustrates the analysis, and the paper closes with minimization measures arranged by the waste hierarchy. Field data should replace the placeholder values in Section 4 before the findings are reported.