94 percent recycled!

I just got the report on the jobsite waste from my house project and we recycled 94 percent of the jobsite waste! How exciting!

The jobsite waste from my 1248 sq ft house totalled 6.1 tons. Of that 3.75 tons were gypsum, 100 percent of which was recycled, and 2.33 tons were mixed, eighty-five percent of which was recycled.

When my builder and I had our initial conversation with the LEED raters, my builder expressed serious doubts about his firm's ability to meet a mandatory element of LEED certification--that the project generate no more than 2.5 pounds of waste per sq ft of conditioned floor area. We ended up at .56 lbs/sq ft, which should qualify me for 1.5 points when I thought we might be hard-pressed to even meet the mandatory minimum!

I've asked my builder to share with me the cost comparison between this route (my builder hired the Institution Recycling Network--www.wastemiser.com and I discussed gypsum recycling in another post) and conventional dumping. I do know that my budget was prepared with conventional dumping in mind and I don't think we exceeded it.

One of the primary reasons I went with SIPs was to reduce jobsite waste. Looks like that logic might be borne out! IRN reports the typical house generates 4-5 tons of mixed waste excluding gypsum, so we came in at half the average. Certainly part of that is because my house is small, but I think we did better than that too.