For a couple of years, I would pass a house on my way to work that was undergoing a thorough (and achingly long) renovation. The jobsite was one of the dirtiest I’ve ever seen. Lumber, packing materials, and lunch debris were scattered everywhere. I was shocked when I saw one day that the contractor had installed a jobsite sign on the property. Though the remodeled house appeared to turn out well, the way the contractor maintained the site didn’t say anything good about his work or his organizational skills. That sign wasn’t exactly his smartest advertising move.
I thought of that jobsite a few weeks ago when I joined a team of volunteers to spend a morning hauling garbage from a local watershed about a mile downstream from that remodeled house. Ugh! Among the beer bottles, food containers, sewing machine (!), and barrels of motor oil (!!) we pulled out of the stream and off its embankments was a ton of construction materials. Most of the stuff looked like it came from a heavy construction site, perhaps from a nearby highway improvement project. Still, I wondered if any of it had floated down from that nasty remodeling site.
As repulsive as the pile of garbage pulled from the stream was, it pales compared with a story I recently heard about a framing crew that routinely tossed used-up rechargeable batteries from power tools on the ground. At the end of a job, they’d “clean up” by burying them in the home’s backyard. That crosses the line from lazy and sloppy to stupidly malicious.
It’s not easy to contain and control the trash and waste materials that large and small construction projects produce. But doing so is an important and necessary effort. Of course, I don’t have to tell you that. I can’t remember ever being on a trashy custom home building site. In fact, many of the custom builders I’ve visited go beyond what’s required to keep their sites clean, orderly, and non-polluting. They understand that it’s good for the environment and that it’s good for business.
So, what I’d like to know is how you do it. What standards do you set for job-site cleanliness? What systems do you have in place to control hazardous items, like batteries? How do you convey those standards and systems to your employees and trades? How do you enforce them? What effect have they had on your company’s image and performance?
Let me know what your company does to keep your sites safe and sanitary at lensor@hanleywood.com. If you’ve got a good procedure or a worthy idea, we’ll post it on the magazine Web site, www.customhomeonline.com, giving you credit, of course. And, who knows, your idea may help another builder, big or small, to clean up the way he runs his jobsites.
