How 38,000 kg of plastic was diverted from Metro Vancouver landfills

A recent project in Metro Vancouver diverted 38,000 kilograms of construction plastic from landfills in just over a year.

Light House, a non-profit that promotes regenerative and circular practices in construction, recently completed a 14-month pilot project called the Construction Plastics Initiative, working with eight construction projects across the region to recycle and repurpose plastic waste.

While waste reduction onus in recent years has been on consumer plastic waste — like Vancouver’s plastic bag ban — about 30 per cent of Canada’s plastic waste comes from construction, renovation, and demolition.

“Construction and demolition [waste], it’s just invisible to the average person,” said Gil Yaron, Light House’s managing director of circular innovation, which is why he thinks it hasn’t been a focus of waste-reduction efforts.

“Instead of plastic bags, we’re talking about other forms of packaging in the commercial context. But it’s all the same idea — single use. And it’s massive in scale, it’s just insane in terms of the volume of material.”

Yaron said most construction waste management systems are “primitive.”

“It’s usually one bin on a construction site. Everything goes into it, and it gets dumped at a landfill,” he said.

He added it can be challenging to get contractors to participate in waste diversion because they say they don’t have enough space on their site for a recycling bin, as well as that they’re worried about the time it takes to train crews.

Another challenge Light House found is that while Metro Vancouver has the capacity to process plastics, many companies think that plastic waste from construction isn’t clean. They also don’t have a ready supply of it, since plastic collection at construction sites isn’t standardized.

What did the pilot project do?

Light House worked with the construction companies on projects like the PNE Amphitheatre, Holdom Overpass, and Steveston Community Centre. A priority of the project was to ensure that it was either revenue-neutral or revenue-positive, so that companies wouldn’t have additional fees.

“It’s just redirecting where things go,” Yaron said. “The contractor on the construction site [is] still paying the hauling fee and a tipping fee to get rid of the material. It’s just instead of it going to a landfill, now it’s going to a company that’s taking it and processing it.”

Despite the concerns around space, it turned out that the sites had enough room for an extra bin. And while the training component on the front end took some additional time, waste separation didn’t require any more time once crews picked it up.

“In fact, we got a lot of feedback, saying that the crews really took pride in the work, knowing that these materials were actually going to be diverted,” Yaron said.

They then took this plastic waste, baled it, shredded it, and turned it into a pellet. Plascon Plastics, a Delta-based company, then took it and produced InfinaNet, a product that can reduce concrete volume by up to 30 per cent.

What’s next?

At first, Yaron said it was challenging to find companies to participate. But by the end of the project, he said they had many contractors approach them and ask what was happening next.

While the Construction Plastics Initiative has come to a close, Light House is looking at creating a second phase of the project that would expand across multiple cities over a longer time frame.

“The timeframe wasn’t long enough to cover the full lifespan of a project. Construction projects take years, and this project was only 14 months.”

In the meantime, Yaron hopes it will bring more attention to construction waste.

“It’s actually much easier to collect and manage materials off construction sites than it is from residential applications, because there’s a very finite number of projects, and each of them generates large volumes of material,” he said.