What can we do about waste in construction? Diversion from landfill isn't enough and there's money to be made. With Chris Clarke (SCAPE)

Zero Ambitions Podcast

In the UK every day the construction industry produces enough waste to fill a football stadium.

Rightly, former guest, Chris Clarke (SCAPE) has got a bee in his bonnet about construction waste and is making efforts to draw attention to the issue. He's not just concerned with the profligate use of resources and the impact on carbon emissions, it's the lackadaisical nature of the waste itself.

Waste management accounts for £1.5BN of construction spending every year. In an industry that's operating on margins so tight that any kind of change can be seen to be prohibitively risky, it seems absurd that such a significant amount of waste is priced into every single large-scale project.

But, while waste, accounting, reuse, circularity, and MMC are all concepts that have an important part to play, but most important is the front-end work that can be done to reduce waste at the point of design.

Whichever way we look at it, when we're asked where we might find the money to drive the circular economy or reduce emissions, it would seem that there might be a simple answer. Even if the solution itself isn't so simple.

If we're hoping for infrastructure changes that will make a significant contribution to net-zero efforts and generate revenue, it looks like we might have an easy-ish mark.

Notes from the show

• Chris Clarke on LinkedIn ([e-mail])
• Construction Waste Portal website
• SCAPE's approach to sustainability
• SCAPE - Building for Public Good: A Charter for Change - a policy/lobbying piece produced for the new UK government
• That Danish development with the recycled brick slips in Architect's Journal
• We Build Eco in the pages of Passive House Plus
• Chris's last appearance on Zero Ambitions
• Innovate UK's Circular Economy Innovation Network
  

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.

• Follow us on the Zero Ambitions LinkedIn page (we still don't have a proper website)
• Jeff, Alex, and Dan about websites, branding, and communications - [e-mail]; Everything is User Experience
• Subscribe and advertise with Passive House Plus (UK edition here too)
• Check Lloyd's Substack: Carbon Upfront
• Join ACAN
• Join the AECB
• Join the IGBC
• Check out Her Own Space, the renovation and retrofit platform for women

**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**