With the proposed demise of Site Waste Management Plans SWMP under the ‘Greenest Government Ever’ red tape plans, could a new-ish ISO standard that puts costs to the impacts identified under ISO 14001 provide direction, guidance or framework for construction to measure and improve material and energy waste?
The standard, ISO 14051:2011, Environmental management — Material flow cost accounting — assists organizations to better understand the environmental and financial consequences of their material and energy use practices, so that they can identify opportunities for improvement.
The standard uses MFCA, Material flow cost accounting, which is “applicable to any organisation that uses materials and energy, regardless of their products, services, size, structure, location, and existing management and accounting systems”
MFCA could be applied on a business wide basis across all projects, understanding material, energy and resource inputs, processing and outputs, as well as on a project basis adopting a SWMP format combined with a Carbon plan driven by ConstructCO2 could indeed turn waste into gold.
Background Reading:
Constructing Excellence SWMP position
Measure, Understand and Improve Construction Carbons www.constructco2.com
Fairsnape 
Good grief! Was that first sentence actually written by a human being? A first sentence should attract not repel… each of us is too busy to read the unnecessarily hard stuff.
LikeLike
Great blog piece. I get very frustrated by SWMP as someone who was around for their launch and seemed to work better when under the DTI voluntary scheme.
I’ve written a blog piece with my own thoughts, but MFCA would drive things more as embodied carbon is often an afterthought, even though much relevent information is being captured by SWMP.
http://diemltd.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/swmp-not-dead-yet/
LikeLike