Design for construction waste minimization: guidelines and practice

Design for Construction Waste Minimization (DfCWM) advocates the proactive minimization of potential construction waste from the design or earlier stage. Numerous DfCWM practices have been recommended, but they are hitherto in a piecemeal fashion without an integrative guideline to enable designers to consider DfCWM in a systematic manner. Their practice examples and application results have also been rarely investigated. This study aims to amalgamate DfCWM recommendations, develop practicable guidelines, and implement in real-world settings. It adopts a design thinking method to develop the guidelines from literature, brainstorming, action research, case study, and most importantly, dynamic iteration thereof. The results affirm the impact of DfCWM on not only preventing construction waste generation effectively but reducing the construction cost without jeopardizing the design. However, its implementation is not merely a simple linear process and requires coordination from all stakeholders. For practitioners, this research also provides the DfCWM guidelines to be a design companion, encouraging deliberation of an entire building and material life cycle with special consideration given to waste minimization. Further studies are suggested for two areas: (a) modelling DfCWM into a multi-criteria optimization problem, and (b) integrating it with other design for excellence considerations.