For decades, the professional football and baseball teams in San Diego, Calif., played inside a brutalist bowl of concrete sitting in a sea of 18,870 paved parking spaces. When it came time to demolish the former Jack Murphy Stadium and build a new one on the same 166-acre site, that same concrete became the foundation for San Diego State University football’s home.
It’s the kind of reuse—part of a circular construction economy—that will become less an exception and more the rule globally as a greater number of lawmakers and regulators establish best practices for industry sustainability. It requires precisely measuring one’s materials. Contractors with an eye on this trend are already recovering, reusing, and recycling what they encounter in demolition as they build anew. By using location intelligence technology to make these operations more precise, they’re saving time and costs, and wasting less.