Rethinking Construction Waste: Why Weight Isn’t Enough
By: Marcial Carrillo, CEO & Jesse Griffin, CTO - Wasteguard Innovations LLC
6/17/2025
Measuring construction waste by weight—like the EPA often does—dramatically misrepresents the true economic and environmental impact of what’s being discarded.
While concrete makes up a large mass of waste due to its density and volume in construction, it is relatively cheap and often recyclable. Meanwhile, high-value materials like hardwoods, metals, piping systems, and specialty finishes are significantly more costly, more difficult to recycle, and have a higher environmental footprint per unit.
Why Measuring by Value Matters
- Economic Waste: A single piece of discarded copper piping or engineered lumber may outweigh dozens of dollars of concrete in economic terms. By measuring only weight, we ignore the monetary loss and missed opportunity to reuse or redistribute expensive resources.
- Material Scarcity: High-value materials are often extracted from limited or sensitive sources. Wasting them has far more impact on supply chains and environmental degradation than wasting abundant and inert materials like concrete.
- Carbon Footprint: Many valuable materials (e.g., aluminum, steel, hardwood) have a far greater embodied energy and carbon footprint than concrete. Sending them to the landfill contributes disproportionately to emissions, even if they don’t tip the scales.
- Circular Economy Alignment: Value-based metrics align better with circular economy goals, which prioritize keeping valuable materials in use and minimizing the need for virgin extraction.
In summary: Weight-based metrics mask the severity of wasteful construction practices, especially those involving expensive, carbon-intensive, or finite materials. A value-based approach reveals the real cost—financial and ecological—of our inefficiencies.
WasteGuard Innovations: The Solution to a Broken Measurement System
WasteGuard Innovations is exposing a critical flaw in America’s construction waste system — measuring waste by weight instead of value. While the EPA reports inflated recycling rates driven by tons of recycled concrete, billions in lightweight, high-value materials like copper and engineered wood quietly vanish into landfills. WasteGuard flips the narrative with smart blueprint enforcement, real-time tracking, and value-based waste accountability. The result? A system that prevents waste before it happens — and finally sees waste for what it really is: lost value.
Read our full whitepaper here: Re-evaluating Construction Waste: A Value-Based Approach to Economic and Environmental Impact
# EPA Waste-Data Inaccuracies: Why WasteGuard Innovations Matters More Than Ever
By: Jesse Griffin - Wasteguard Innovations LLC
7/29/2025
RIP Marcial "Pooner" Carrillo - Gone but not forgotten.
While concrete makes up a large mass of waste due to its density and volume in construction, it is relatively cheap and often recyclable. Meanwhile, high-value materials like hardwoods, metals, piping systems, and specialty finishes are significantly more costly, more difficult to recycle, and have a higher environmental footprint per unit.
Why Measuring by Value Matters & Why the EPA’s Waste Estimates Fall Short
The EPA’s “Facts & Figures” on municipal solid waste (MSW)—often cited as 292 million tons generated in 2018 with only ~32 percent recycled or composted—are increasingly questioned by independent researchers Bluesky Social US EPA +1 US EPA +1 . Galloping changes in measurement methodology in 2018, particularly around food waste inclusion, dramatically altered year-to-year totals, revealing that data continuity is shaky at best.
More critically:
- - A Yale study suggests actual waste volumes could be more than twice what EPA reports YaleNews
- - The EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) recently found that internal control failures in 2024 could have led to inaccuracies in billions of dollars of programmatic decisions and reported figures.
- - Widespread concern about reliance on outdated emission factors—used even in air pollution permitting—suggests that agency data may not accurately reflect current conditions (WIRED) (The Guardian).
- - True Sharps Volume & Exposure Modeling Rather than relying on broad EPA MSW tables, WasteGuard’s system integrates real-time usage metrics (e.g. how many sharps containers used per shift in a medical unit), enabling accurate projections at the unit, hospital, and municipal level.
- - Emissions Profiling vs Estimated Factors While EPA leans on average emission factors (often outdated), WasteGuard’s solutions incorporate direct waste stream measurements—reducing reliance on flawed proxies and delivering compliance-strengthening insights.
- - Pilots That Provide Ground-Level Proof WasteGuard’s early pilots have shown consistent reductions in mis‑disposal incidents and improved staff compliance—outcomes poorly reflected in EPA’s macro-level statistics but highly visible in real-world settings.
- - Data Continuity Risk: When EPA changes methodology drastically (like in 2018 food-waste recategorization), comparisons across years become invalid. WasteGuard’s consistent unit-level data avoids that pitfall.
- - Underserved Niche Focus: EPA MSW tables serve the broad public waste picture—landfills, recycling, composting—but medical/hazardous industries represent a high-risk niche largely invisible to public stats.L
- - Policy Leverage: As regulators respond to EPA OIG concerns and demand stronger data audit trails, WasteGuard offers the kind of validated, auditable system that bridges the trust gap regulators and health auditors now demand.
- Taken together, these raise red flags: if historical baseline data on waste generation, diversion rates, emissions, or hazardous compliance are off, then policy, funding, and industrial compliance decisions based on them are also unsafe.