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Gil Yaron is managing director of circular innovation for Light House, a Vancouver Island non-profit that has launched the Building Materials Exchange, an online site enabling contractors to swap, share and sell building materials rather than sending them to landfill. Yaron spoke to Canadian Contractor to explain the new service.
CC: Who is Lighthouse and what is the BMEX?
Yaron: Lighthouse is a nonprofit organization. We’ve been around since 2006 and our mission is to support or advance what we call regenerative and circular practices in the built environment. So basically working with the construction sector and anybody who’s involved with building, from designers through to contractors and trades to improve the sustainability and environmental performance of buildings and and the use of sustainable materials and reduce the amount of waste that’s coming out of the construction sector. So that’s where the Building Material Exchange comes into play. We started it on Vancouver Island and we we call it the Tinder of the construction sector, basically matching companies up. One company’s trash is another company’s treasure, and keeping materials out of landfill while also turning these waste materials into a resource. So maintaining the economic value of these materials and supporting what we call a circular economy by keeping these materials circulating.
CC: How does it work?
Yaron: So the program is free. Companies basically register with us and then they can, if they have materials that they that they want or they don’t need – either excess building materials from a project or salvage materials they get from renovations or deconstruction projects – they can either post them online through our BMEX marketplace, which is just launched. We basically keep an inventory of companies and materials that are available and we kind of act as a matchmaker to find companies that could use those materials. And we’re also setting up a hub where contractors can take excess building materials or salvage materials and and then retail customers like Joe Smith can basically come and buy material so that they can use them in their their DIY projects. So there’s a whole bunch of different ways to participate in the Building Material Exchange and the idea is just to capture all these materials, keep them out of landfill and find new and better uses for them.
This operates just like Facebook Marketplace but it’s for businesses and it has that functionality. So we’re trying to make it easier for industry by giving them the ability to set up alerts so that when you know if somebody wants drywall, they learn about posts when a post comes up for drywall. Similarly, for companies that post materials there’s an inventory management tool so they can see all their listings in one place and they can control what they have. For instance, if there’s a contractor who has his guys on site who are taking pictures of the materials and uploading the ones that they need to get rid of. And then the the guy in the office, the lead, is adding details about the product so they can coordinate or collaborate in terms of managing those listings. So it it’s a bit more sophisticated than Facebook Marketplace and it’s designed to support the industry and make it fast and efficient for for guys to transact.
The listing is free, again like Facebook Marketplace, but it’s up to the parties to decide whether they’re going to charge for the materials or not. So they could barter the materials. They could sell them for money. They could donate them – whatever they want. But we step away from that. That’s not our business. We’re just providing the platform to facilitate the exchange so as of right now, listings are free. We basically fund the program through grants, making it free. In time, there will be a need to find another way to monetize the platform.
CC: Where is funding coming from?
Yaron: Right now we we have the program funded through a number of grants that we’re getting from the Capital Regional District, the Regional District of Nanaimo, the Cowichan Valley Regional District and the city of Nanaimo. We have also support from Coast Capital Savings, which is a credit union. And then we have organizations like the Vancouver Island Construction Association, the Canadian Home Builders Association Vancouver Island chapter. They are partners with us in this project, kind of helping us engage with their membership and get the construction industry involved in in BMEX.
CC: What’s the scale of the construction waste problem?
Yaron: About a third of all waste that’s going to landfill right now comes from the construction, renovation and demolition sector. The cost to operate a landfill is millions of dollars each year and there are closure costs. For instance, the Vancouver landfill is due to close in about seven years. Well, five to seven years from now we’re hitting about $180 million in closure costs and then maintaining that closed landfill afterwards also has costs associated with it. So the faster we fill up our landfills, the more cost there is to the public and to industry. Industries are paying through tipping fees and consumers are paying through their property taxes to maintain our waste management system. So the more material we can divert, the slower our landfills fill up and the more money we save in terms of managing solid waste. So there’s a real public interest in conserving our landfill space. The other thing is that when these landfills close, we need to find other landfills. And nobody wants a landfill in their backyard. So there’s a real incentive, both financial but also a kind of a community interest, in in in preserving the space in our landfills as long as we can.
CC: Do you have plans for future expansion of the program?
Yaron: The Building Material Exchange program is happening on Vancouver Island. There are opportunities for reuse and re-purposing of materials across Canada in different informal ways. We are looking to expand BMEX into Metro Vancouver and beyond. And there’s a lot of interest being shown in during in different jurisdictions. So we’re very excited about the potential to replicate program. There are definitely reuse stores all over North America. Some of them are amazing. There’s some, like the one in Baltimore, that are incredible. There is some sharing that happens between manufacturers, lots of what we call industrial symbiosis, where one manufacturer is creating a product and they’ve got a lot of sawdust, so that sawdust becomes fuel or some type of input for another business. So a lot of those kind of relationships are established, but they’re ad hoc. They don’t operate through a program or there isn’t a program to support and and build those opportunities, those connections.
We would love to see BMEX operating in every major city in Canada. And we built the marketplace platform to be expandable so any city could simply sign up and have its companies posting materials there and transacting just within their community, but also with other communities. So if it makes financial sense for a company in Vancouver to be purchasing something from a company in Calgary and shipping it out, then that that would be a possibility. So this platform is expandable that way and we designed the entire program to be able to scale in that way.
CC: How do you ensure good behaviour in your participants? Is there a rating system like Uber?
Yaron: I absolutely thought about that because we definitely don’t want people to get frustrated in this process. We know what it’s like on Facebook Marketplace, you can spend a lot of time trying to get something off of it then the guy just goes ghosts you at the end. Or it’s not what you thought you were going to get. In this case, all companies have to register to participate on the BMEX marketplace and only companies are allowed to register. So you know you’re just transacting with other industry players within the community. It’s a very select pool of companies that are on the on that platform. There isn’t a star review system but it’s just by virtue of the fact that we curate and we have a filter. You have to qualify to enter and participate on the site.