Issues on Construction Waste: The Need for Sustainable Waste Management Sasitharan Nagapan 1 , Ismail Abdul Rahman 1 , Ade Asmi 2 , Aftab Hameed Memon 1 , Imran Latif 1 1 Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia 86400 Parit Raja, Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia sasi81@hotmail.com 2 Universitas Bakrie, Indonesia Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said Kav. C-22, Jakarta 12920, Indonesia Abstract—Construction wastes have become a pressing issue in many developing countries and have adverse effects on environment, economy and social aspects. Illegal dumping is a common issue created from the physical construction waste and besides that non physical waste like cost and time overruns are not properly addressed among the construction players. This paper explores the impacts of construction on sustainable construction and contributing causes which will help the practitioners to formulate ways in avoiding or reducing the waste. It also highlights the sustainable approach in managing the construction waste as practice. Keywords-construction waste; illegal dumping; cost overrun; time overrun; construction waste causes; sustainable waste management I. INTRODUCTION Construction industry plays a key role in socio-economic development of any country. Nowadays construction industry is rapidly growing because of increase in standard of living, demands of infrastructure projects, changes in consumption habits, as well as natural increase in population. This growth has contributed significantly in waste generation [1] [2] [3], which has become serious problem for every nation. Several researchers and practitioners indicate that waste emanates during planning, design, procurement, and construction stage [4] [5] [6]. The waste also influences economical dynamics of society and also has an important effect on the environment and surroundings [7]. Construction waste can be clustered into two groups namely; physical and non physical waste as shown in Fig. 1. In common, physical waste is generated in the form of material loss. It contributes to a significant part of landfill. Studies show that construction industry produces large amount of waste and more than 50% of waste material is deposited in landfill [8]. Reference [5] reported that almost 26% of landfill occupied with construction waste. In another recent study as in [9], pointed out the waste generated in China are around 40% and 39.27 million tons in Spain [10]. On the other hand, non physical construction wastes mainly are time and cost overrun for construction projects [11] [12]. These problems will become more critical when a stoppage of a particular construction work and this cause the abandoning of the project. There are numerous research works carried out on construction waste and the findings show several negative impacts to the environment, social and economy of a country [13] [14] [15] [16]. These impacts also contribute to a reduction in construction productivity and thus reduce the performance of the overall construction project [11]. These negative impacts are pushing the construction industry to integrate with sustainable approach in moving toward sustainability [17]. It is timely to adopt sustainable construction waste management to avoid its potential negative impacts. Hence, this paper discusses the issues created from physical and non physical construction waste and also the factors that generated construction waste. It also provides different dimension of handling construction waste which leads to sustainable construction waste management. Figure 1. Classification of construction waste [18] II. ISSUES RELATED TO CONSTRUCTION WASTE Construction waste is a prominent issue globally and has adverse effect on overall performance of a project as well as the society and nature. Waste can be generated in various forms. As indicated in Fig. 1, the waste occurs in the form of material, time and cost losses. A. Materials waste as a physical construction waste The major physical waste generated from construction activity is identified in the form of material waste like concrete leftover, demolished debris, steel scrap and others [3]. Studies show that material waste has significant impact to the cost of the project as well as an adverse impact on environment. One of the implications created from huge quantities of material waste is illegal dumping. Illegal dumping is the unlawful deposit activity of waste onto land [19]. This unethical activity always causes problems to the CONSTRUCTION WASTE Material waste Physical waste Non physical waste Time overrun Cost overrun 2012 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science & Engineering Research (CHUSER 2012), December 3-4, 2012, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia 978-1-4673-4616-0/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE 317