A recent report produced by Transparency Market Research projects that the world will generate nearly 2.2 billion annual tons of solid waste by the year 2025, up from 1.3 billion tons in 2012. Astonishingly, it is estimated that nearly half of that waste is generated on the construction job site. What’s more, solid waste is only the tip of the iceberg; inefficiency in the built industry runs much deeper than the billions of tons of wood, asphalt, concrete, and other physical byproducts from the construction of our homes, office buildings, schools, and roads.
Waste permeates throughout the entire construction lifecycle, taking the form of time delays, rework to address defects, unnecessary processing of materials, idle equipment, and more. Wasteful production, in any form, carries significant consequences not only for the profitability of the AEC industry, but also for the productivity and safety of our construction workforce, for the supply-and-demand chains that drive our economy, for the…