With typical new residential builds producing 4.5 tonnes of waste per house and most of it ending up in skips then on to landfill, Nigel and Jacki from Benton Build chose to do things differently.
Read more below and WATCH VIDEO here.
Changing the way construction waste is handled.
Junk Run are working with Benton Build alongside Auckland Council, Auckland University, Unitec, Mega Mitre 10 and Master Builders throughout this project. Together we are all working to reduce waste by getting materials reused, the scrap metals, wood and plastics separated, using take back schemes and recyclers with the aim of diverting over 90% of any waste from landfill.
Since mid-2021 Junk Run has been helping Nigel and Jackie (owners of property development company Benton Ltd), work towards a zero-waste building site.
Like many other developers in Auckland, they bought a large corner section on Titirangi Road with a vision. They had the old wooden house trucked away one night, in two pieces to be reused. Now they are busy building eight three storey new modern townhouses, with a plan to minimise the waste going to landfill to almost zero!
There are no traditional skips on this site. Skips tend to encourage a “throw it all in the skip mentality” which means everything gets cross contaminated. Instead, Junk Run has been helping with waste management systems and the onsite sorting and separating with carefully labelled wheely bins.
This has helped the onsite team and subcontractors to recognise the materials they are about to discard, to sort, separate and think about them before they are thrown out. Detailed records are also being kept allowing for full analysis and audit of the waste streams generated on-site, including weight and volume. So far, we are well on track- with almost nothing going to landfill yet.
Deliveries to site are arriving without unnecessary plastic wraps, and everything is being carefully separated and considered before being removed. Offcuts of wood are being harvested for nogs and other small packers, overs and offcuts of plastic water and conduit piping have been returned to the manufacturers. The design of the homes has been carefully planned with waste minimisation top of mind, including the materials chosen for the finishing.
The results were so outstanding that OneRoof wrote an article about it.
Junk Run has doing things differently since 2010. Hand sorting, separating, and ensuring as much as possible is reused or reallocated before considering recycling or landfill as an option.
To make the move towards Zero Waste on your next project – contact us today!
