My leaky basement bathroom renovation started with the best of intentions. I told my contractor I wanted the old bathroom materials reused where they could be or diverted from the landfill. He nodded and promised. I signed the cheque. For a week, I watched him haul heavy sacks into his truck, each one disappearing without explanation. I never asked where they went. Most people don’t. It’s not really a thing we do in Canada. 

In 2025, Canada scored fifth worst for waste management out of the 38 countries within the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), beating out the United States but still hanging out in the basement. Not exactly an elbows-up moment.

Replacing the bathroom and storage doors had better results, but I had to become a part-time door detective to get the goods. I spent evenings scrolling through Facebook Marketplace, trying to avoid the ritual of unanswered “Is this still available?” messages. Reclaimed oak doors seemed to vanish the moment I clicked. 

Undeterred, I hit the pavement, taking transit across town to a closing sale at a half-empty Habitat for Humanity ReStore in the South Riverdale neighbourhood of Toronto, frantically texting door pictures to my wife because, in this case, the size really did matter. It would be a failed mission, but later that week, I headed to a ReStore in North York for another door inspection, then pleaded with UberXL drivers to ferry me and two rescued doors across the city.

I found the final door online and wedged it into my compact short-term rental. I crept home, knees cramped, questioning my logistical choices, if not my life choices. It should be easier to reuse and get more value out of the goods we consume, but it's not really a thing we do in Canada. 

Canada’s material productivity — how much economic output per unit of resource — ranks second to last out of 38 OECD countries. Statistically, we rely heavily on extracting and consuming materials, generate relatively little economic return from them and throw far too much away.

Australia, a basement-dweller just ahead of Canada, has pledged to lift its material productivity by 30 per cent. Canada has not and that’s a problem. We could start to change that while tackling the millions of new homes Canada wants to build, the new off-site construction industry we want to develop and the new requirements we’ll need to meet to sell products to Europe. 

Canada’s construction industry produces more than four million tonnes of waste a year, about 12 per cent of the national waste generated. Only 18 per cent is diverted and roughly a third of what ends up in landfill is wood, writes Raphael Lopoukhine

Increasing material productivity in construction is about making buildings adaptable and materials recoverable, while using resources efficiently and keeping them circulating at their highest value for as long as possible.

Canada’s construction industry produces more than four million tonnes of waste a year, about 12 per cent of the national waste generated. Only 18 per cent is diverted and roughly a third of what ends up in landfill is wood. That’s a lot of wasted carbon and a missed economic opportunity.

Precise and efficient, off-site construction is one of our best chances to break that pattern. The federal government sees it as a key tool for speeding up housing delivery, improving affordability and increasing energy efficiency. All true, but what makes it transformative is that its prefabricated pieces can be made to assemble and come apart cleanly — modular not once, but for life! 

It also enables a pathway, so our unique resources are not treated as disposable, but put to work to build our cities and towns, whether it’s using waste straw as high-performance insulation or reclaiming old-growth lumber into prefabricated wall panels.

As part of an effort to increase supply and adoption of modern methods of construction, the federal government is encouraging the use of standardized, ready-to-build design templates released through CMHC’s Design Catalogue. 

The catalogue includes 50 standardized designs, from laneway houses to sixplexes, but none designed for material productivity. It doesn’t have designs with panels and beams that can be reused across projects, materials that are locally-sourced and easy to separate at end-of-life, or guidelines for modular units that can expand or contract with a household’s needs over time. 

Shifting to design for disassembly and modular construction can reduce material waste by up to 80 per cent, cut project timelines by 20 per cent and create new skilled local jobs in remanufacturing, materials recovery and design. That shift won’t necessarily cost more: an analysis of a prefabricated building designed for disassembly found that deconstruction profitability increases with building height since more reusable components are available. 

And concerns about upfront cost ignore where the market is heading. Any off-site industry that wants to sell to Europe will need a Digital Product Passport after 2026, meaning it will need an end-of-life plan for its products. That's a quick transition from elbows up to shoulder shrugs if we’re not ready.

Seeing materials as long-term assets, not one-time consumables, will have cascading benefits for our economy, communities and the climate. With that mindset, we can build a more productive industry built on predictable inputs and real data rather than guesswork and handshakes.

There is some repaving work down my block. Maybe my basement rubble is part of the roadbase. In more material-productive countries, building materials don't disappear, they just change addresses. If we want a more productive and competitive construction industry, we need to use the materials from our past to build the infrastructure of the future. 

That’s something we can do in Canada.

Raphael Lopoukhine is the director of strategic initiatives at Circular Construction Canada, a solution space of Generate Canada; co-chair of the Dutch Canadian Circularity Alliance; organizing committee member of the Toronto Circularity Network; a former political staffer in the Ontario environment ministry and a former journalist whose work has appeared in ABC News, the Ottawa Citizen, CBC News, Toronto Star, the Narwhal, the Tyee, North Shore News, and the Georgia Straight. 

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