Analysis of Wastage of Construction Materials in a Construction Project

The adverse effect of the wastage in construction industry is creating lot of concerns. Project cost gets increased, and profit margin gets decreased and causes safety hazards. In this context, a research project is done to analyze the wastage of construction materials in the site with the help of a live case study. The research scope is to explore the material wastage indices (MWIs) of construction material such as cement, steel reinforcement, concrete, fine aggregate, coarse aggregate, and bricks that tend to have high importance and high embodied energy because MWI can be used as an excellent tool to monitor and control the quantitative requirement of inputs in construction projects thereby affecting overall cost control on the project. This is done by knowing the actual consumption and estimated consumption (including wastage that is likely to occur) of respective material on particular site. To arrive at the material wastage indices, a survey (face to face) is carried out on twenty-two construction projects which encompasses residential buildings and commercial buildings. It has been found that material wastage indices are higher in percentage than the permissible limits in many of the sites.