Background In modern economies, building activities account for more than 30% of raw material and energy consumption. Accordingly, the environmental impact of the building sector is considerable. There are, however, significant opportunities for reducing its impact through process optimisation. The development of environmentally-oriented logistics for building sites can contribute greatly to reducing the negative environmental impacts of the construction industry. Objectives The objectives of the project were: - To reduce traffic from heavy goods vehicles (HGV) by enhancing the role of rail transport. This would relieve pressure on the urban road network, reducing road traffic and erosion, as well as air pollution, greenhouse gases, and noise emissions. - To reduce dust emissions caused by construction sites; - To encourage the pre-sorting of residual building materials on-site, and reduce the number of trips made to dispose of this waste material; - To improve the institutional regulatory framework for environmentally-oriented building site logistics. - To draw up a set of guidelines for sustainable construction-site management, including environmental checklists and monitoring methods for projects and sites. Results The City of Vienna implemented the project together with three partners from the building industry: Ökotechna, Mischek Bau AG, and the Vienna Land Procurement and Urban Renewal Fund WBSF (since 01.05.06 renamed "Wohnfonds Wien"). In addition, companies from the building, waste and transportation industry were involved in the project through regular roundtable meetings. Three demonstration initiatives were implemented at eight demonstration building sites with different characteristics. These initiatives focused on the following topics: - Transporting material such as soil excavation and pre-fabricated parts by rail, instead of road. - Ecological building-site management, including dust reduction, waste separation at the building site, and a reduction in the trips needed for waste disposal. - A competition among building firms to determine the most environmentally responsible planning for a building-site for approximately 500 homes. Present legislative and market conditions do not offer sufficient incentives or obligations for sustainable building-site management. Therefore, based on the lessons learnt from the demonstration initiatives, a great part of the RUMBA project focused on developing recommendations for regulations, standards, contract-awarding procedures and incentives. A further important result was a manual for sustainable building-site management. Targeting architects, building engineers and other planning offices, it provides guidelines for environmentally friendly building-site logistics and specific recommendations for distinct building procedures. Environmental criteria were developed for public tendering. For example, specifications were developed for a so-called "sorting area", where waste from construction sites is centrally collected and sorted into volume-optimised containers, thereby reducing the number of waste transports by lorry. The evaluated criteria are implemented and continuously improved at a large property-developers competition project at the Thürndlhofstraße area, in the south-east of Vienna. Compared with traditional construction management, a more than 80% reduction of heavy-load lorries was achieved. The project proved that dust emission can be reduced to about 50%. Furthermore, construction waste can be better sorted, decreasing the amount of mixed building-site waste from around 75% (for conventional building-sites) to under 50%. The resulting reduction in dump costs means that efforts taken to increase the recycling of building-site waste are financially worthwhile.