Most building construction and demolition debris (C&D waste) is of durable, non-toxic, natural material, including wood, concrete, asphalt, gypsum, various metals, paper and glass (in fact, 90 percent or more of all building debris is fully recyclable). When a building is torn down and dumped into a landfill, it is at considerable expense to the contractor, and owner and causes considerable harm to the environment. There are no accurate figures for the total amount of construction-related waste produced in the US annually. However, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the US has about 1,800 active municipal solid waste landfills, 1,900 operating C&D landfills and more than 10,000 old municipal landfills. In all, municipal landfills in the US are piling up at a rate of 250 million tons per year—a staggering 293 percent increase since 1960. Waste generation per person has almost doubled since 1960, up from 2.6 pounds to now 4.6 pounds per day per person. The recycling rate nationally is only 34 percent. As much as 30 percent of all landfill dumping is estimated to be from C&D waste. In Seattle, according to the Department of Planning and Development, 700 buildings were torn down and mostly landfilled in 2007 alone.

Designing new buildings to meet a higher performance standard such as LEED™ is certainly important and necessary to reducing future energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions, but it does not make up for even a fraction of the enormous loss of embodied energy used to create buildings in the first place, combined with energy expended in the demolition, trucking and landfill operations. Clearly, we cannot solve our energy problem and meet the global climate protection challenge without addressing the designing of short-life, throw-away buildings and destroying reusable older buildings. Many of the older buildings being demolished today were designed passively with more durable materials, natural daylight and ventilation and out-perform newer so-called “energy-efficient” buildings.

With so much waste generation and industrial material ending up in unseen landfills, why can’t more be done to recover reusable C&D waste? While the Northwest is a national leader in residential recycling (now about 50 percent compared to the national average of 34 percent), few jurisdictions have established goals, programs or incentives for C&D waste recycling. State and local governments have jurisdiction over C&D landfills, and the EPA regulates municipal solid waste landfills. C&D landfill, including even some toxic materials, is largely privately owned and operated, unregulated at the state and local level. Unknown amounts of C&D materials are also believed to go into combustion facilities or unpermitted landfills. But besides recycling materials from older buildings, the least wasteful, “greenest” alternative is to extend the building’s life through retrofitting and adaptive reuse.

More can be done, and is being done, in other cities to tackle this mammoth environmental problem. For example, Portland, Oregon mandates that all building projects valued at over $50,000 separate on site and recycle all non-toxic construction materials. New York City provides tax incentives, electric rebates and employs re-zone strategies to encourage re-use and the conversion of commercial buildings to residential. In King County, Washington the GreenTools C&D recycling program emphasizes education and outreach to contractors and suburban cities on the environmental and economic benefits of re-use and recycling. Still, for new construction, the LEED™ rating system for high performance buildings should assign greater value to Design for Disassembly, older building reuse and on-site recycling of C&D waste. Another approach would be to impose a federal carbon tax on the demolition of existing buildings, calculated on the embodied energy wasted in disposing of the structure.

In the private sector, since there is no regulatory mechanism to incentivize C&D recycling, the waste management industry has a near monopoly on the disposal of solid waste and is resistant to the recycling of C&D materials. They’re in the business of hauling and dumping, and they own the profitable landfills. And even the so-called garbage recyclers, without standards to measure content, have recovery rates nationally as low as 10 percent. Despite these barriers, there is good money to be made in recycling construction waste, and in the greater Seattle region, a budding industry of independent C&D recyclers is emerging. Glacier Recycle located in Auburn, Washington is the Northwest’s leading construction materials recycler. They recycle just about everything—wood, concrete, stumps and land clear, asphalt roofing, metals (including one million nails per day!), plastics, old corrugated cardboard (OCC), carpet pad and even co-mingled debris. Employing more than 90 people, their facility, including a co-mingled source bin, wood pulverizer, nail extractor and concrete crusher, is an awesome sight.

Best management practice of construction waste starts with managing the waste stream at the construction site before it leaves on trucks. Source separating in multiple bins can save as much as 50 percent of the hauling/tipping fees, and that means more profit can be made in recycling construction materials. To achieve higher diversion rates, a consistent standard for measuring recycling rates is needed, as is establishing regulatory incentives and removing barriers to C&D recycling. Glacier Recycle, with a whopping recovery rate of 87 percent, proves it can be done. Glacier boasts the diversion of 20 million pounds of construction materials from landfills each month—helping the environment while creating serious competition for conventional garbage haulers.