Construction Waste: A Dumpster Dive

Clearstory

This Old House

History, Home & Garden, Leisure

4.9 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’ve all seen a dumpster full of debris on a job site, but do you know anything about where that construction waste ends up? We generate about 570 million tons of construction waste every year... and that number is growing. Listen as This Old House Contractor Charlie Silva sorts through what we can reuse or recycle, the EPA’s Nicole Villamizar runs the numbers, and Professor Debbie Reinhart looks to smarter technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:46.3	I'm at one of our job sites, an old house built in the 1890s, and there are workers and tools all over this site. And one of the tools, and an essential one, is right in front of me.
0:51.3	The dumpster. And as I look into it, filled with all sorts of debris, pallets, drywall, cardboard, we've
0:59.7	got some metal scraps as well.
1:03.4	This container, it's going to be filled and refilled dozens of times on this job site.
1:10.0	In fact, there are two here right now. There's a separate
1:12.9	one just for brick. Across this country, we generate about 570 million tons of construction
1:20.3	waste every year. That's twice as much as the stuff that we put into our household garbage.
1:26.2	And where does it all go? Well, we wanted to find out.
1:34.2	From this old house, this is Clear Story. Your home in a new light. I'm Kevin O'Connor.
1:43.8	Well, it is a necessary evil.
1:45.4	One, we have to, as you said, whether you're demoing, tearing the whole house down or a selected room or gutting the house.
1:51.1	It has to go somewhere.
1:53.1	That's our own Charlie Silva.
1:55.6	Charlie is heading up construction on the Cape Ann Project House we're building just north of Boston.
2:01.1	The necessary evil he's talking about is the dumpster.
2:05.0	A typical dumpster, or 30-yarder, as we call it, can hold four to five tons of material.
	...

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