Abstract

It was argued that either the construction industry to continue to be conservative and inefficient on the premise that it was distinctive or it should have opened-up to learn lessons from the best practices models in other sectors like manufacturing. This paper is a comparative study of the sustainable end-of-life management practices in the automobile and the Nigerian building sector with the aim of examining the feasibility of construction industry learning lessons from model of the automobile industry. While the practices in the automobile sector were obtained from literature, the practices in the Nigerian construction industry were investigated using in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The participants were construction industry experts with experience in building demolition as directly identified by the researchers or identified using snowball technique. The results of a comparative evaluation of the practices in the two industries shows that the practices in the construction industry can be improved by adopting five sustainable practices from the automobile industry. These are materials sorting techniques, maintaining materials database, reverse logistics and extended manufacturer responsibility, standardisation, and application of advanced material handling technology.    

Key words: End-of-life, waste management, automobile, construction, Kano Nigeria.