The problem hiding in plain sight

Construction consumes roughly 40% of the world's raw materials, and a huge share of what gets ordered never makes it into a finished building. In Egypt, where the construction sector has been growing faster than almost any other part of the economy, that waste problem is amplified: an estimated 40–50 million tons of construction and demolition waste are generated every year, much of it ending up in landfills that aren't equipped to handle it safely.

What struck us going into this study was how much prior research on Egyptian construction waste stopped at description. Study after study documented what was being wasted, or proposed frameworks for disposal — but far fewer asked practitioners directly: what do you, the people actually running these projects, believe is causing this, and what are you actually doing about it?

Going straight to the people who see it happen

So we built a two-part questionnaire and sent it to 250 construction professionals across Egypt — contractors, consultants, and project owners — and got 113 valid responses back. The survey asked people to do something surprisingly revealing: rank 42 different possible causes of material waste, grouped into seven categories (design, procurement, handling and storage, human factors, management, site conditions, and external factors), from most to least important. Then we asked a second question: which sustainable practices — from waste auditing to BIM adoption to Site Waste Management Plans — are they actually using, not just aware of.

What the data told us

The results didn't confirm what we half-expected going in. We assumed procurement mistakes or material handling would top the list. Instead, human-related causes dominated — lack of skilled labor came out as the single highest-ranked cause of material waste, ahead of poor communication and plain negligence. Site conditions came a close second, with poor site layout and organization ranking as the top issue in that category.

Perhaps the most interesting tension in the data showed up when we asked about sustainable practices rather than causes. When professionals were asked to weigh strategies purely on economics, "Reduce" won clearly (39.8%). But when asked to weigh the same strategies on environmental grounds, "Recycle" won by a wide margin (58.4%). That gap between what's cheap and what's green is, in many ways, the whole policy problem in miniature — and it explains why recycling rates in places with strong regulatory backing (much of Europe) run far ahead of places where the market alone is expected to make it happen (the U.S. sits around 35%, and Egypt faces similar structural gaps).

Why this isn't just an academic exercise

The practical upshot of the study is that a lot of Egypt's construction waste problem doesn't need new technology — it needs training, supervision, and coordination. Waste auditing, efficient resource use, Site Waste Management Plans, and eco-design at the design stage all ranked as the practices professionals see as most effective — and notably, these are mostly organizational fixes, not expensive ones. BIM adoption, while valued for quality control and clash detection, ranked more modestly, likely reflecting real barriers around cost and technical capacity that are worth taking seriously rather than assuming BIM alone will solve the problem.

Where we go from here

We end the paper arguing for an integrated approach: better workforce training, stricter site supervision, proactive design coordination, and — critically — policy reforms like mandating Site Waste Management Plans, since voluntary adoption alone hasn't closed the gap. We also flag a clear next step for the field: using smart technologies (sensor-based tracking, image recognition, predictive waste modelling) to move from ranking causes after the fact to catching them as they happen on site.

Egypt's construction sector doesn't lack awareness of its waste problem. What it lacks, based on what practitioners told us, is the training, structure, and enforcement to act on that awareness consistently.

Read the full paper, "An empirical assessment of material waste drivers and sustainability strategies in Egypt's construction sector," open access in Discover Sustainability (2025) 6:1154. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-025-01976-2

Authors: Mohamed M. Ghoneim, Ayman Halabya, Osama Morsy Moussa & Abbas Atef Hassan, Department of Civil Engineering, Military Technical College, Cairo, Egypt