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

**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.