In 1947, a group of scientists – including Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer and others who had worked on the Manhattan Project – founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Haunted by the destructive force they had unleashed on the world, they sought a way to warn humanity. They needed a symbol that could communicate urgency, fragility, and danger without a single word.

They created the Doomsday Clock.

The hands on this symbolic clock could be shifted back or forward depending on how close humanity stood to catastrophe; whether from nuclear weapons, climate change, or, more recently, artificial intelligence. Midnight meant destruction. Midnight meant the end.

Over the years, the hands have moved back and forth, but never by much. Humanity, it seems, is always flirting with disaster.

Today, that clock stands at just 89 seconds to midnight – the closest it has ever been. Nuclear threats sharpened by the war in Ukraine, rising global instability, conflict in Gaza, a worsening climate crisis, a US president that treats allies as enemies and enemies as allies, and the unstoppable march of technology have all conspired to keep us teetering on the edge.

The UK demolition and construction industry does not have a Doomsday Clock. But perhaps it should. For if such a clock existed, its hands would not rest calmly at twenty or thirty minutes from midnight. No. This industry – long plagued by crises both slow and sudden; longstanding and relatively recent – would find its own symbolic clock drawing ever closer to catastrophe. Each unresolved problem, each mounting challenge, each missed opportunity for change ticks the hands forward.

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I’ve got to tell you something that seems to be landing with very little fanfare, but that could quietly blow a hole in budgets up and down the demolition and construction supply chain.

It currently costs £4.05 per tonne to dump inert waste – rock and concrete – at a UK landfill. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small tariff compared to the £126 charged for the disposal of general waste. And besides, those in the field of demolition send materials to landfill only as a last resort. They would much prefer to recycle, reuse or – better still – resell those materials at a profit rather than shipping them out as a cost.

Now, though, there’s a very real possibility that the government could wipe away that lower rate entirely. The government is currently analysing the feedback from a formal consultation that proposes a tax escalator so that by 2030, that £4 goes the same route as standard waste: a full £126 per tonne.

I’ll save you doing the maths. That’s a 3,000 percent tax hike in effect.

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It is Zero Waste Week. It’s OK if you didn’t know that. I didn’t either, until someone told me. Perhaps those behind the campaign decided not to waste their money promoting it.

When demolition and construction people hear the words “Zero Waste Week”, I am sure most of them will picture overflowing skips, mountains of rubble, and diesel-belching machines chewing through concrete. They’ll imagine campaigns to recycle aggregates, to reuse timber, to cut down on single-use plastics in site canteens. And that’s all fine. Noble, even.

But let’s be honest. The demolition industry is already a world leader in recycling. And besides, the biggest waste in demolition and construction isn’t something you can sort into a recycling bin. It isn’t measured in tonnes or litres. It’s invisible, corrosive, and it multiplies faster than paperwork in a health and safety audit.

Because while we wring our hands about the waste of bricks, steel, and fuel, we quietly ignore the daily avalanche of wasted time, wasted money, wasted people, wasted energy, and wasted goodwill. The kind of waste no one photographs for sustainability reports, but everyone on site knows all too well.

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About this time last year, I wrote an article entitled “the law of unintended consequences” in which I spoke about how one seemingly positive action can result in a negative outcome. I revisited that subject in May this year with an article called “construction’s lack of consequences”. The same notion was also the inspiration for a piece I write just a few weeks ago called “Right Hand vs Left Hand”.

Each time I have written about this, my words have been greeted with widespread, almost universal recognition. “Yes,” people say. “Obviously if you raise the Landfill Tax, some people will just fly-tip their waste illegally.” Or, “if you demand industry veterans prove they’re capable of doing the job they have been doing for the past 30 years, some of them are going to tell you where you can poke your NVQs”.

Sadly, as is so often the case, factors that seem patently obvious to those on the ground are considerably less obvious to those in loftier positions within the UK demolition and construction industry.

And few organisations are quite as lofty and as far removed from the muck and bullets of the demolition and construction trenches as the Construction Industry Training Board (or the CITB as it is known, affectionately or otherwise).

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