www.fastcompany.com: The construction industry generates a lot of waste. Construction and demolition create more than 600 million tons of waste debris every year in the U.S., according to Environmental Protection Agency figures from 2018. That’s twice as much as the municipal waste collected from homes and businesses in cities.
5 comments:
TWaste created from building projects is something I have been thinking a lot about recently, especially as someone interested in both set design and environmentalism. All materials used to design and create a show (including paperwork) has to go somewhere once it is no longer being used or needed. This creates a lot of waste! Some things can be recycled or repurposed, but some things cannot. Certain treatments on objects also causes their destruction process to be not desired, as the object could have maybe originally been recycled but after being covered in a specific paint is no longer able to. I am not sure how CMU disposes of set pieces, props, costumes, equipment, etc that we cannot use. It is something I will look into. I've noticed in class, in addition to productions, a lot of scenarios where assignments that were required to be printed did not have to be. This again causes waste. Reminding myself to be eco-conscious is something I need to do constantly. This article was a great way to check myself.
I was really shocked when I saw the statistics mentioned in the article. Having 96% of materials reused and recycled means that only 4% are really used for what they are meant to do. Although I am very grateful for construction companies to become aware and take actions in reducing waste, I agree with the article that “[they are] not designing it per se and … not initiating how budgets are spent”. I think designers and project managers should also be mindful of the amount and type of materials used. I think the biggest obstacle will be making the contractors aware that their profit would not necessarily be affected. And as the article mentions, it’s still a learning and convincing process.
It really is sad to think of how much preventable waste we produce. Live Entertainment is a small slice of the bigger picture but it's disheartening to see us budgeting shows and stressing over every foot of a piece of lumber, when we are in the middle of preparing to toss an entire set into a dumpster. I know we talk about storage being a massive problem but I still believe we have the space and the means to try and store some of the lumber that we toss. It wouldn't be a matter of storing many shows worth, but just a portion of a single shows worth of lumber stored and constantly rotating so to speak as we build and tear down these shows. I think it would have an impact on the bottom line of our season as far as materials waste is concerned. We are doing a disservice to ourselves by seemingly making no effort to reuse our materials. Our dollars could go further and our environmental impact could be lessened.
I think in general, the waste produced by industries around the world could be way less if there was better waste management. So often, things that are perfectly good are thrown away because the job doesn’t need them but if there was better communication between jobs, materials can be shared and thus way less waste would be sent away and the jobs could be completed for way less money as well. We just need some communication in order to lessen our waste because so often one job’s trash is another job’s raw material. I think the future of our world in a perfect utopia will involve constant communication to make use of raw and used materials in order to save money and save materials and I hope that we get there soon because I hate worrying over the environment and I would love to stop freaking out about it constantly.
I think that the issue of waste from construction is a really important issue to make progress on, but is also a difficult problem to solve. I think that a lot of the difficulty comes down to the cost of using recyclable materials and the desire to be able to shift when things go wrong. The first thing that is going to drive most large companies' plans is unfortunately economics. They want to be able to build the biggest, best building they can, and they want to be able to stress a limited budget as far as possible without infringing on their own profit margins. This means that they want to use the cheapest materials available that will be useful for the task at hand, even if they are not recyclable. The way to make progress on this issue is for manufacturers to work on recyclable materials while being cheap and having structurally desirable properties. The other issue which can lead to waste is contractors ordering extra materials, in case something breaks or plans change. This is much harder to avoid because you do not want to have to stop construction, just because the framer is short a 2x4.
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