Rethinking Construction Waste: Why Weight Isn’t Enough
By: Marcial Carrillo, CEO & Jesse Griffin, CTO - Wasteguard Innovations LLC
6/17/2025
Measuring construction waste by weight—like the EPA often does—dramatically misrepresents the true economic and environmental impact of what’s being discarded.
While concrete makes up a large mass of waste due to its density and volume in construction, it is relatively cheap and often recyclable. Meanwhile, high-value materials like hardwoods, metals, piping systems, and specialty finishes are significantly more costly, more difficult to recycle, and have a higher environmental footprint per unit.
Why Measuring by Value Matters
- Economic Waste: A single piece of discarded copper piping or engineered lumber may outweigh dozens of dollars of concrete in economic terms. By measuring only weight, we ignore the monetary loss and missed opportunity to reuse or redistribute expensive resources.
- Material Scarcity: High-value materials are often extracted from limited or sensitive sources. Wasting them has far more impact on supply chains and environmental degradation than wasting abundant and inert materials like concrete.
- Carbon Footprint: Many valuable materials (e.g., aluminum, steel, hardwood) have a far greater embodied energy and carbon footprint than concrete. Sending them to the landfill contributes disproportionately to emissions, even if they don’t tip the scales.
- Circular Economy Alignment: Value-based metrics align better with circular economy goals, which prioritize keeping valuable materials in use and minimizing the need for virgin extraction.
In summary: Weight-based metrics mask the severity of wasteful construction practices, especially those involving expensive, carbon-intensive, or finite materials. A value-based approach reveals the real cost—financial and ecological—of our inefficiencies.