We’re burying the solution

World Environment Day this year carries the theme ‘Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future.’ It’s an invitation to look at the natural world for answers to the climate crisis. For the construction industry, one of those answers has been sitting at our feet – and we’ve been sending it to landfill.

By Mel Lizza, General Manager Recycling, Boral

Every year, Australia’s construction industry buries roughly 29 million tonnes of its own potential.

Concrete, brick, asphalt, sand – material that took energy to extract, process and transport – heading to landfill when it could be heading back to site.

That number sits uncomfortably alongside another one: the building and construction sector is responsible for 34 per cent of global CO? emissions. We are, simultaneously, one of the planet’s biggest waste producers and one of its most significant contributors to climate change. But those two facts don’t just describe a problem. Together, they point directly to a solution.

The construction industry has a circularity gap, and closing it is one of the most powerful levers we have on climate. Australia’s overall circularity rate sits at just 4.3 per cent, well below the global average of 6.9 per cent. The federal government wants to double that by 2035. Given the sheer volume of material our industry moves every year, construction is where that ambition will be won or lost.

The good news is that demand for change has never been stronger or more commercially real.

From July 2024, government procurement tenders for construction services over $7.5 million requires suppliers to measure and report on embodied carbon reduction. That’s not a sustainability aspiration buried in a policy document. That is a condition of contract. Tier 1 contractors are passing those requirements downstream. Developers are answering to investors for them. Asset owners are writing minimum recycled content thresholds into specifications. The questions our customers ask today: is this material recycling? where did this material come from? what’s the carbon footprint? can you give me a waste diversion report? These are questions they simply weren’t asking five years ago.

That structural shift in buyer behaviour is what makes this moment different.

At Boral, we’ve spent years building the infrastructure to meet it. Our recycling business processes more than two million tonnes of construction and demolition waste every year across 14 facilities nationally, with more than 95 per cent recycled, reclaimed and repurposed rather than landfilled. Half our recycling sites sit within our quarry footprint, meaning recycled content actively extends the life of our natural reserves.

But the volume alone isn’t the story. What we’ve built is an end-to-end Circular Materials Solution that integrates waste management and material supply across the full construction lifecycle – from pre-demolition planning through processing, testing and reintroduction as recycled road base, aggregates and sands, with the data and reporting our customers need for their green ratings and sustainability disclosures. We’ve applied it on multiple projects ranging from Mirvac’s Green Square development in Sydney to Blackrock, Australia’s first luxury sustainable motor racing resort at Lake Macquarie.

And we’re pushing further. In September 2025, Boral achieved what we believe was an Australian first. In a trial, we made concrete made with recycled aggregates recarbonated using CO? captured directly from flue gas at our Berrima Cement Works. Recycled aggregates are highly effective at absorbing carbon dioxide – making them not just a higher quality recycled product, but a potential carbon sink. Research suggests recarbonation could offset between 20 and 55 per cent of process emissions from cement manufacturing. That is a frontier worth pursuing.

And it doesn’t stop there.  Boral is innovating, trialling, testing and investing heavily in R&D to support and grow sustainable opportunities around the reuse of its products – recycled aggregates, reclaimed sand, recycled glass, asphalt and so much more.

This World Environment Day, the call to be ‘inspired by nature’ is a reminder that natural systems don’t produce waste – they produce inputs for the next cycle. The circular economy isn’t a new idea. It’s one the natural world has been running for billions of years. Our industry is finally catching up.

Circularity in construction is no longer a niche sustainability play. It is a commercial reality arriving faster than many anticipated. The materials from our projects shouldn’t end at the gate of a landfill. They should circulate again, and again.

We have the infrastructure, the scale and the technology to make that happen. The question is whether our industry moves quickly enough to meet the moment.

To learn more about Boral recycling and its Circular Materials Solution, go to: https://www.boral.com.au/products/recycling

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