Gil Yaron is managing director of circular innovation for Light House, a Vancouver-based organization that works with construction professionals to help reach environmental goals. One of his current projects is the Construction Plastics Initiative (CPI), which seeks to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.

How did CPI come about?
CPI was born from a conversation in 2023 between myself and Jeff Wint—previously with OceanWise and now with Recycling Alternative—about concerns regarding plastics escaping construction sites and ending up in waterways.

We are experiencing a plastic crisis in Canada and around the world, yet we don’t have any data on the amount of plastic waste being generated from construction sites. What we do know is that all of it is currently going to landfill.

Jeff and I put a proposal together to study the degree to which plastics were escaping, but the project did not proceed. Then, in 2024, the provincial government’s CleanBC program announced a new round of funding for the Clean Plastics Action Fund. We saw an opportunity to expand our original concept to capture all plastics leaving construction sites and to explore the ability to develop a circular economic model for repurposing plastics as a resource in the creation of new building materials.

Fortunately, CleanBC selected CPI as a pilot project. The federal government later joined the project to explore the alignment of data tracking with requirements under the new federal plastics registry for producers of materials for construction, to be introduced in 2026.

How does the initiative work?
The purpose of CPI is to demonstrate an alternative to the linear economic ‘take-make-waste’ model in the construction sector.

Currently, plastics are manufactured to make and package building products. In all cases, these plastics ultimately end up in landfill—in the case of packaging, after a single use. Significant attention has been placed across Canada on addressing the plastic crisis with a focus on single-use products and packaging, but this has not addressed plastics coming from construction, which is arguably the largest single source of plastic waste.

CPI is working with 10 construction projects to capture all plastics generated during the process. The plastics are sorted, weighed and tracked to determine the types and volumes of materials leaving the construction sites.

Materials made from polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE) are pelletized and integrated into new building materials, creating a circular model for managing construction waste as a resource. The remaining plastics are either recycled or, if there is no option, landfilled.

Based on the findings from these 10 construction projects, CPI aims to estimate the total amount of plastics generated on construction sites in British Columbia and Canada and demonstrate the viability of a circular economic model that treats waste as a resource.

What role is there for consulting engineers?
There are two opportunities for consulting engineers.

The first is to source products made from post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastics, such as those we are currently manufacturing with the plastics from CPI, and to ask their suppliers to include PCR content in their products.

The second opportunity, in keeping with circular economic principles, is for consulting engineers to encourage their suppliers to (a) reduce the amount of plastic packaging for their products and (b) establish take-back programs for plastic packaging.