WASTE-TOOL a project financed by The European Programe               LEONARDO DA VINCI The community action Programme for vocational training

The European building industry has to search for new ways of dealing with construction waste in order to survive in competition. The building sector is characterised by a trend towards internationalisation of tenders and placing of building performances, increasing waste disposal costs and EU requirement for an appropriate environmentally friendly waste disposal (s. e.g. EU instruction on waste tip/dump of April 26^th, 1999). What lacks in the building practise as well as in the respective training efforts is a cross-trade (all-embracing) waste management. With this, only in Germany waste reduction by 30% could be achieved. If additionally recycling oriented logistic measures were employed, costs could be reduced by further 30%.

The current training efforts envisage primarily waste related legal information. Contents and methods are mostly oriented on trade-specific aspects, training is offered in external centres whose transfer effect (to applicable skills) is low. Such training offers are hardly accessible by foreign workers who mostly stay temporarily in the country.

 The project goals:

1. Development and test of a building waste management concept aimed at a cost-efficient and waste reduced building construction

2. Development and test of a modular off- and on-line waste management program in the languages of the partners and English for the on-site employment and vocational training purposes

3. the integration of a Multilanguage Thesaurus for specialist terms of the building sector and its enlargement by specific terms of waste management including also  a Polish version.

The programme enables

to optimize material usage by planning the building constructions

to assess building constructions

to optimize construction processes according to waste aspects

to  improve output oriented software supported communication on optimization of resource usage  and waste issues among the agents on-site

 
The building site as an all-encompassing place is in the programme’s didactic approach placed in the very centre. Thus it achieves practicability; it is action related, enables to individual learning and promotes more effective learning also by disenchanted learners. So learning with pc alternates with “vivid” settings on-site, i.e. in team and task related contexts. The programme promotes the generation of new qualifications, the introduction of vocational sustainability and life-long learning efforts.  

The product shall be marketed by Editorials, employed in training centres, disseminated by professional associations and sold/circulated on site by SMEs of the building and waste management sector.