How can we recycle construction waste?

[olivia982]

I recently read a blog on recycling construction waste  https://www.ftmmachinery.com/blog/construction-and-demolition-waste-disposal-management-problems-and-recycling-solutions.html. Has anyone of you heard of it and built a house or anything else with construction waste?

[nod]

There quite a lot of recycled materials available From hardcore to roof tiles that are made from  tyrees 

[markc]

The waste on construction sites really irritates me, some of it is natural wastage, some laziness, some unfortunate and the rest is just incompetence.

you will always get off cuts etc, that’s understandable, skipping pallets of bricks and blocks because the bands have broken making them difficult to move by fork truck in laziness .. it’s not my job!

concrete and mortar etc not being used because the brickies or ground workers didn’t turn up (offered more money down the road).

and then the gross over ordering or incorrect ordering - I was on a site in London and watched 3 full artic loads of bricks unloaded straight into skips because they were the wrong shade.

rant over! Yes you can use recycled or left over materials as long as they are not structural or you can prove their origins/grade etc.

Construction companies rarely allow someone to take excess material because their QA and waste management will determine how waste is disposed of.

[joe90]

@markc I totally agree, a few years ago there was tons of timber used fir hoarding at a building I was working in about to be taken away and dumped, I asked if I could help myself but told it was not allowed, came back after dark and spoke to the gate guard who agreed and let me in and help myself ?.

[ToughButterCup]

@olivia982, believe me we try  hard to reduce waste or to reprocess it ourselves. But it takes time and money and planning. And on DIY Max, there's not much 'space' for that.

 

There are loads of small things you can recycle yourself; wood sheeting, screws, various bigger bits of timber, post stuff on Freegle, FB and other sites, but  that doesn't amount to much. We give away wood off cuts to local families with wood burners. If we have skip I put up a notice advertising that we are keen to recycle. Locusts descend fairly pronto.

 

We used several hundred tonnes of MoT1 (thats at least partly recycled stuff) for the base, and our wood block ICF system uses (or at least used to use) recycled wood.

In all, I recon we've used at least 500 tonnes of recycled material (400 for the base +100 for the blocks).  We will also be recycling our own  heat soon: (MVHR)

 

A lot more could be done.