How we can recycle more buildings

Did you know that over 35 billion tons of materials are extracted from our planet in order to build all the different buildings each year?

Sustainability experts in the UK are trying to find ways to reduce the amount of waste associated with these building procedures in order for the construction to be a more eco-friendly process. They initially hope that the waste can be reduced as a whole, but for the waste that does have to be accumulated, they hope to find ways to recycle and reuse.

Key Takeaways:

More than a third of all material found in landfills consists of Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) associated with building projects.
Circular construction refers to the strategy of turning CDW into raw materials for new building projects.
One obstacle to more recycling of CDW is the costly process for testing and certifying recycled materials for use in construction.

“Technical issues – such as price, legal barriers and regulations – that stand in the way of the solutions being rolled out more widely must also be overcome through innovation.”