A Model For Investigating Construction Workers’ Waste Reduction Behaviors

With the rapid development of urbanization in China,the rising house projects,infrastructure,and urban expansion projects have led to the generation of a large amount of construction waste(CW).And construction workers are the main labor force carrying out activities on construction sites and occupies key positions in the entire CW management chain.However,most of the existing researches on workers were empirical research and studied their behaviors from static view,ignoring the dynamic causality and interactions among variables of waste management system,which could cause deviation to some extent.Thus,from a dynamic and systematic perspective,this paper investigates specific influential paths and effects of different management measures on construction workers’ waste reduction behavior(CWWRBs).This presearch is aimed at solving unclear mechanism of CWWRBs and low effectiveness of managerial measures.First,based on the theory of planned behavior(TPB)and relative literature,we summarize main factors affected CWWRBs.On this basis,the interpretive structure model(ISM)is established and the extended model of TPB is applied to preliminarily establish the influential path that how these factors affect CWWRBs.Second,establishing a dynamic model through the system dynamics(SD)method to explore the causation of CWWRBs.Last,introducing Zohar’s classification method to investigate the impacts of management measures on promoting CWWRBs in the different stage,so as to find out optimal management scheme aimed at maximizing the efficiency of CWWRBs.Regarding to results,limit of site space,unit landfill charge and workers’ production pressure,these three factors are both antecedent and fundamental factors.Meanwhile,workers’ CW perceptual variables(including attitudes and subjective norms)could promote the effects of waste reduction.Based on simulation results of three typical groups of management measures,namely,reactive actions(RAs),prioritization(P)and preventive actions(PAs),it is found that overall RAs and P are more effective in improving CWWRBs,while the effect of RAs is the most significant.Besides,RAs would be more effective in the early period of construction processes while PAs more effective in the later period.This study not only,for the first time,presents a deeper explanation of causations of CWWRBs,but also provides a model through which construction waste management policies and measures can be simulated in advance to effectively improve CWWRBs.