Zero Ambitions Podcast

In the UK every day the construction industry produces enough waste to fill a football stadium.

Rightly, former guest, Chris Clarke (SCAPE) has got a bee in his bonnet about construction waste and is making efforts to draw attention to the issue. He's not just concerned with the profligate use of resources and the impact on carbon emissions, it's the lackadaisical nature of the waste itself.

Waste management accounts for £1.5BN of construction spending every year. In an industry that's operating on margins so tight that any kind of change can be seen to be prohibitively risky, it seems absurd that such a significant amount of waste is priced into every single large-scale project.

But, while waste, accounting, reuse, circularity, and MMC are all concepts that have an important part to play, but most important is the front-end work that can be done to reduce waste at the point of design.

Whichever way we look at it, when we're asked where we might find the money to drive the circular economy or reduce emissions, it would seem that there might be a simple answer. Even if the solution itself isn't so simple.

If we're hoping for infrastructure changes that will make a significant contribution to net-zero efforts and generate revenue, it looks like we might have an easy-ish mark.



Notes from the show

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.


**END OF SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**

What is Zero Ambitions Podcast?

Zero Ambitions is a consultancy and weekly podcast about sustainability and the built environment.

We find interesting and experienced guests who know what they're talking about, usually to discuss how we navigate the complexity of decarbonisation and sustainability in the built environment and its many related sectors.

Hosted by Jeff Colley and Dan Hyde, publishers of Passive House Plus magazine (UK and Ireland), the podcast has now grow into a consultancy, Zero Ambitions Partners.

The consultancy specialises in defensible sustainability communications. We create the strategy that makes built environment leaders stand out, enabling them to occupy positions that are distinct and defensible.

As with the podcast itself, we help organisations to communicate about what they do and the value that they offer. Usually, this means strategies to change a conversation from price to value and how to futureproof an offer with evidence that makes its claims watertight.

If you're a leader, or want to become one, we help you to make sense of where you stand in your sector, how to improve your positioning, how to communicate this to the market you operate in, and how to highlight the difference between you and your peer group.

If you can engage your value chain by speaking about what matters to them, you can educate your key stakeholders and turn them into evangelists for your cause.

Book a ‘ZAP Defensibility Audit’, but brace yourself
- Uncover value and opportunities that you may 
not have recognised
- Find out if your sustainability claims are defensible
- Find out if your claims are too meek
- Change the conversation from price to value