Making the construction industry circular is by no means an easy feat. In the United States alone, 600 million tons of construction waste go to landfills every year, at a cost exceeding $36 billion. But of those 600 million tons of waste, about 75 percent has residual value, meaning there is a massive market waiting to be tapped.
Now, some North American start-ups are doing just that. One is Surplus, founded by two Rhode Island School of Design alumni, Michael J. Farris and Aanya Arora. Surplus, launching this fall, is a decentralized digital marketplace for recyclable construction materials. Contractors searching for materials can use Surplus not only to find local construction sites with surplus material but also to have it delivered to their job site the same day. A pile of bricks, for example, which otherwise would have ended up in a landfill or a warehouse, can now become part of another building, reducing waste, the need for new material, and lengthy transports.
Contractors have three options when they end up with surplus material, Arora said: “One is to send it to landfill; the second is to put it in a warehouse; and the third is to sell it back to the supplier, minus a restocking fee. It’s perfectly good material going to waste. Surplus closes this gap and creates a circular flow of material waste.”
Surcy, short for the French word surcyclage (upcycling), is a Montreal-based social enterprise start-up developing its own niche in this new market. Used materials often have to be reconditioned or reprocessed before they can be used in new construction. A significant hurdle for those seeking to make the reuse of material feel like the status quo is the visibility and unorganized state of the reuse ecosystem: The problem isn’t a lack of builders willing to reuse materials; it’s developing tools for those who don’t know where, or how, to start. To this end, Surcy is building a repository of actors involved in the process of reusing materials. When launched, Surcy’s digital directory will allow contractors and developers to connect with artisans and companies already reusing construction materials. The hope is that keeping all this information in one place will make it easier and, therefore, more attractive to reuse construction materials, in turn accelerating the industry’s transition from linear to circular.
“We need to shift as quickly as we can, because otherwise, it’ll be catastrophic,” said Melania Grozdanoska, cofounder and director of operations and strategy at Surcy. “So, for us, it is about reducing the amount of time people need to spend looking for information and instead take action.”
To make the industry more circular, Farris believes, we must play by the rules of today’s linear economy. To get everyone on board—particularly the contractors and developers—purchasing surplus or used materials must be worth it.
“Can we make this circular model efficient and easy to use, where purchasing surplus material is just as easy as buying new?” Farris asked. “The sustainable option has to be the easiest, most accessible, and cheapest option,” added Arora.
Technological solutions can play a key role in this effort, and both Surplus and Surcy have opted out of the more traditional method of stockpiling and selling surplus or refurbished construction materials out of a warehouse. Instead, their online platforms serve as facilitators rather than vendors.
“The idea of the logistics and management of storing materials at a warehouse—it didn’t seem efficient,” shared Farris, who noted that as soon as any kind of real estate space is involved, a venture like this becomes much more difficult to scale. Now, with construction sites serving as de facto storage units, Surplus allows contractors to connect locally and regionally, forgoing big, multinational suppliers and traditional ways of acquiring materials.
“Instead of this top-down, capitalistic way that we currently go about purchasing materials, this is a model for how we can begin to share resources in a more democratic way,” Farris said.
Technology holds great promise for promoting an industry transition to circularity, explained Grozdanoska. It can simplify material logistics and be used to compare the embodied carbon of design options with different amounts of reused materials using building information modeling. But, she insisted, technology cannot be thrust onto contractors by people behind screens, protected from the messiness of the construction site and its complex logistics of people and things.
“There’s a lot more improvisation on construction sites than we think of as practicing architects,” Grozdanoska said, explaining that to get contractors on board, technology needs to suit how they already work, not how we imagine they should work.
“There is this personal aspect where contractors have specific means and methods of doing things. We have to go to them to see what their needs and wants are,” Farris explained.
“Technology is an augmentation of a relationship you build with other people,” Grozdanoska reflected. “If that’s what we can do with these new programs, then I think it will be successful.”
Oscar Fock is a Swedish freelance journalist based in New York City, where he reports on climate change, its effects on humans, and how we are responding.
