Construction Waste Given New Life
Date Posted: June 28, 2019
Posted In: Ideas,
From Jobsite Procore: Each year the construction industry discards more than a billion tons of materials, including metal, glass, concrete, plastic and wood, much of which ends up in landfills. A recent report by Transparency Market Research estimates the amount of waste produced per year will more than double to more than 2.2 billion tons by 2025, according to Construction & Demolition Recycling.
But those materials don’t grow on trees. Well, except for the wood. Wasteful overproduction only serves to unnecessarily deplete finite resources. With the pace of demand for new construction accelerating every year, along with the global population, those numbers will probably only get worse if nothing changes. Fortunately, corners of the industry are turning a serious eye to the problem and devising novel ways of breathing new life into construction waste materials.
“The ongoing, sustained growth of the global population as well as dwindling resources urgently require us to do some rethinking in the construction industry“, says Werner Sobek, Director of the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design at the University of Stuttgart and founder of the Werner Sobek Group. “In future, we must reduce our consumption of construction materials and build for many more people.”
Demolition produces much of the waste, and although many companies diligently separate their recyclables before carting away their debris, many don’t. Part of the necessary mindset shift is away from one of “everything is discardable” to one of getting maximum utility out of existing materials, particularly when their production or disposal consumes natural resources.
Many construction materials can simply be broken down and re-used, as long as they don’t contain anything potentially hazardous that’s government-regulated like lead, PCBs or asbestos. Concrete and asphalt, which rank among the biggest contributor to construction waste, can be crushed and re-formed, either into new asphalt for paved roads or as base course for driveways or footpaths, while metals like steel, copper and aluminum are being melted down and formed into different metal products.