It’s no secret that the construction industry produces a lot of waste. When you do any kind of demolition as part of your business, you’re much more likely to be taking tons of the debris to the landfill. If you’re starting to feel like this is just a part of your business, there may be another way. Here’s how you can evaluate your company’s waste production, with a few ways you can cut down on the excess.

Measure Waste Production
Figuring out how much you’re sending to the landfill might be easy or difficult, depending on the work you do and how you dispose of waste. Take a few months or even a year’s worth of projects and evaluate how much waste you create. Since about 90 percent of construction waste is through demolition, the amount of debris you’re dealing with will be much higher if you’re taking down buildings as well as creating new. Consider the mass and weight of the waste you get from a project. If it’s materials you bought, see how much of your purchase becomes waste. This will help you figure out how to cut back.

Consider Ways to Cut Back
Efficient construction processes are good for virtually everyone. When you look at how you waste time, energy or materials, you have an opportunity to cut down on unnecessary expenditures. You might be obtaining materials from a source that uses much more packaging. You could be cutting or shaping materials in a way that creates too many leftovers you can’t use. Cutting down on the supplies you buy because you’re using them better saves you money and space in the landfill.

Make Sustainability a Priority
The best product is one that lasts longer without needing to be demolished or rebuilt. While using sustainable materials is an important part of construction, sustainable construction is another way to keep debris out of the landfill. Once a building is a few decades old, experts have to evaluate the benefit of keeping the building upright compared to replacing it with something better, safer or more efficient. If you look at these aspects in your construction practices, you can consider adding new approaches that improve them. You may be able to build something that will last decades longer without needing complicated or expensive retrofits.

Look for Recycling Options
Reclaimed wood sounds like a fashion trend for high-end homeowners, but reuse is a good practice for most fields in construction. In many cases, you can take materials you remove and sell or donate them to organizations that repurpose them. There are rules for the ways that you can recycle debris, as well as the types of materials. For example, people can recycle concrete as long as it doesn’t have other elements like wood, paper or trash. Look for recycling centers near the jobsite to make transport that much easier.

Use Recycled Materials
For the greatest efficiency, you may be able to recycle and reuse some products while you are still on the jobsite. Concrete has been a nightmare for decades because it’s heavy, bulky and hard to reuse. Yet, people are finding new ways to work with it. With the right equipment, you can pulverize concrete into pieces that you can use as road base or to make new concrete. This dramatically cuts down on your material purchases and the energy spent shipping them. Since materials like wood and metal already have healthy markets for recycling, you can also look for supply companies that sell recycled materials.

Dealing with waste is just one part of running a contracting business. To explore our courses and find the construction field that’s right for you, contact CSLS today!

Construction workers need to drink water throughout the day for their health and ability to do their jobs well. The problems are that there are so many ways this can go wrong on a construction site. You expect the taps to be working, only to learn that they’ve been stopped by another process on the jobsite. You bring in water and it gets contaminated by accident. Keeping drinking water safe is important, but sometimes easy to forget. Here are a few tips to make sure that you and your employees have safe drinking water wherever you are.

OSHA’s Standards for Drinking Water on a Construction Site
The way that people get water while they’re working in construction has some conditions. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration says that workers need water that is:

• potable (i.e. safe for consumption)
• in a container with a lid that can be sealed tightly
• held in a container that is not used for anything else
• dispensed through a tap, not dipped

This might be easy to meet if you are working on a site with existing construction and functioning taps. If you’re going to use a cooler with a tap and have your employees use disposable cups, you must provide a sanitary place to keep the unused cups and dispose of the used ones.

How to Protect Access to Drinking Water Onsite
Since people can easily get sick or even die without water, you have to treat it like you would any other gear you bring to protect yourself. This means you must think about it in advance and have a plan in mind. For each aspect of the project, answer the following questions:

• How will you get water each day?
• How easy is it for your workers to get water when they need it?
• What happens if that access changes?

Workers may have different levels of availability depending on the job they’re doing. If anyone has limited access, such as having to walk a long distance or regularly interrupt their work, you might need to think of an alternative.

Providing Backup Water Sources in an Emergency
There are times when you’ll forget to bring the water, or there is some reason that you can’t use the water onsite. For example, the city of Poway recently had to put homes and businesses on a boil order because of backflow into the water supply from recent storms. If something like this happens to you, you will need to have a backup. Keeping a spare supply of water in your vehicle might be all you need. Locating alternative sources of water nearby, even at a local convenience store or grocery, also may be able to provide for you and your workers until you come up with a Plan B.

Water Consumption Recommendations for Construction Workers

Anyone in any job needs to drink about 64 ounces of water per day. Positions that require a lot of heavy labor or working outside in the hot sun usually need more. For example, if you’re working in the Mojave Desert and it’s 115 degrees outside, your workers may need to drink as much as four cups of water per hour that they are operating outside. In this case, you will need to keep a supply of fresh, cool water and encourage everyone to drink water several times per hour. People who are engaged in work might not think to drink until they are extremely thirsty, but this can be dangerous in hot weather.

Safe access to drinking water is a cornerstone of your business’s ability to function. Without it, everyone’s productivity may decline sharply. To learn more about ways you can run a contracting business, contact CSLS today!

The construction industry has been booming ever since the world started to rebound after the Great Recession. The year 2020 brings several changes that contractors should keep in mind while they grow their businesses. With a greater emphasis on technology, the widespread acceptance of the design-build approach, and an increasing importance of hiring skilled labor, you can see that there are new avenues of the market to explore or continue developing.

1. Labor Shortage Continues
   As members of the baby boomer generation continue to retire from construction, you’ll continue to see labor shortages particularly in expert fields. The economic crash of the late 2000s drove millions of workers out of the construction industry in search of more reliable jobs. Ten years later, those numbers still haven’t recovered. Companies will try to meet their needs by working to secure contracts with a smaller pool, usually in the form of higher pay and increased benefits. They will also look for ways to bypass certain types of labor they can’t secure, such as the use of drones or other technology.

2. Modular Construction Increases
   In the name of efficiency, modular construction will likely keep increasing in popularity. Businesses are finding that they can complete projects earlier and at a lower cost if they can produce certain aspects of the building offsite. This allows them to control the conditions and often create more usable products in the same amount of time. Less work also makes it easier to work with a limited labor pool. Improvements to modular construction to make the buildings competitive with site-built construction will help to persuade more people to give it a try.

3. New Construction Slows
   When the economy started to rebound, this led to a flood of new construction projects. The smaller pool of qualified workers and construction businesses meant that some regions saw projects booked years out. In certain parts of California, this might continue for some time. Otherwise, you can plan on a gradual slowdown of new starts in residential and commercial construction. This is mostly tied to a decrease in demand, but also relates to a rise in tariffs and trade disputes with countries that provide a large amount of manufacturing.

4. Technology Takes Prominence
   The use of technology has been one of the best ways that contracting businesses can get work done without having to track down experts who are retiring in droves. Even if you weren’t an early adopter of drones, AI or automation, there’s good reason to get in now. At this time, technology is rapidly expanding in various construction fields but also changing quickly. This means that you’re not likely to see tools and devices taking over jobs as much as enhancing your work or making it more efficient. Getting on board now may make the difference between staying current with your competition or falling behind.

5. Design-Build Is Here to Stay
   Involving contractors in the design stages of a project has been the norm in some construction fields for years. At the higher levels, particularly for government-funded projects, people have been slower to accept an approach that combines the design and bidding parts of the process. This is changing, as more organizations realize that they can save a lot of time on a project and promote greater accuracy by getting the contractors who will do the work on board at the beginning.

The year 2020 is going to be an exciting year for the construction industry, full of opportunities for contractors with the right skills and experience. To start building your career as a licensed contractor, visit CSLS today!

It happened in New York, and it could happen here in California. Dozens of inspectors went to various construction sites and found tens of thousands of violations. Many of them were related to safe practices and working conditions. Although you’re not likely to encounter an unexpected inspection during the course of your project, there’s good reason to be prepared. Here’s how you can ensure that everything is in order.

What Are Common Construction Violations?
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) keeps a list of the most common violations each year. Many of them, like communication about hazards and respiratory protection, apply to a variety of industries. For construction in particular, fall protection, scaffolding and ladders top the list. So besides making sure you’ve always got the right building permits for the project, safety needs to be your first priority when it comes to avoiding violations.

Who Can File a Safety Complaint?
Although contractors in New York were surprised by these unexpected inspections, California contractors need to be prepared at any time. Almost anyone on the jobsite can file a safety complaint to Cal/OSHA. This includes workers and employers. If someone sees a lack of safety procedures or dangerous activities happening at a particular site, they can call Cal/OSHA or email their complaint. The person who files the complaint is kept confidential so that they don’t face retribution.

What Happens if a Worker or Inspector Files a Safety Complaint?
Safety violations happen on occasion. There are a lot of rules to follow and in some cases, workers may not know that what they are doing is incorrect or risky. When someone files a complaint to Cal/OSHA, the department will follow up on the information they receive. If it appears to be accurate, they may issue a citation to the business. In order to clear the citation, businesses must post the citation for three working days or until it is corrected. They also have to submit proof that they fixed it and post that in the work area, as well.

How Can Contracting Businesses Avoid Violations?
In the short-term, there are many things that you can do to avoid having to deal with safety violations. Cal/OSHA publishes a variety of guides for construction businesses to follow. These include:

• learning safety regulations based on the task
• providing personal protective equipment to employees
• posting guidelines in a place that employees can easily access
• reporting serious workplace injuries or deaths as quickly as possible

When implementing a new program, business owners may want to use a safety checklist for each part of the jobsite. Having a site manager or other person in an overseeing capacity complete the checklist will help to confirm that the safe processes are not just understood, but followed consistently.

What Can Businesses Do to Prevent Unsafe Workspaces?
Ultimately, unsafe construction sites tend to be a combination of lack of information, limited availability of safety equipment and minimal incentive to follow the rules. Businesses may be required to send employees to regular safety training, to teach or reinforce safe procedures. Providing time each year for workers to get a refresh helps to ensure that they remember what to do.

Avoiding injury isn’t just about avoiding fines that may come from serious safety violations. As a contractor, you’ll often be as involved in the daily tasks of a project as any of your employees. Attention to safety can help keep you off of Cal/OSHA’s list, but it also protects you personally.

In construction, California businesses are always on show to prove that they provide a safe workplace. When you know what to do, you can avoid injury and violations that slow down your work. To begin building a safe contracting business, visit CSLS today!