Reverse Logistics for Construction Offcuts Supporting Zero Waste
Construction material offcuts are consolidated and sorted at NX facilities through a milk-run collection system, enabling efficient recycling.
Customer：Construction companies
Challenge (Before)
At construction sites, various types of building material offcuts—such as gypsum boards and insulation materials—are generated. However, it is difficult to sort these materials in detail at each individual site, and they are often treated as mixed waste. As a result, recycling rates remained low and disposal costs continued to rise.
In addition, the conventional approach of transporting materials individually from each site to recycling facilities led to higher transportation costs due to small-lot shipments and increased CO₂ emissions.
As environmental responsibility and sustainability initiatives become increasingly important, there was a growing need for a system capable of efficiently collecting and recycling construction material offcuts.
Solutions
NX Solution
- Implemented a milk-run collection scheme in which a single vehicle visits multiple construction sites to efficiently collect construction material offcuts. Collection frequency and vehicle allocation are optimized according to the volume generated at each site, enabling an efficient pickup plan with minimal waste.
- Collected materials are consolidated at NX transshipment facilities, where they are sorted by material type, including gypsum boards, glass wool, and rock wool acoustic insulation.
- Utilization of dedicated containers (NRBOX) improves efficiency across collection, sorting, and transportation processes. This reduces sorting burdens at construction sites while ensuring stable and reliable collection operations.
- After sorting, secondary transportation to recycling plants is carried out based on the volume of each material type.
Benefits
Benefits (Results)
By introducing a milk-run collection system that circulates among multiple construction sites, the number of transportation trips has been significantly reduced compared with conventional individual transport, leading to lower CO₂ emissions.
The sorting and recovery rate of construction material offcuts has also improved, enabling many materials that were previously treated as mixed waste to be recycled.
Through improvements in transportation efficiency and recycling rates, NX supports customers in achieving their zero-waste goals and advancing the circular economy from a logistics perspective.
