Waste

Now or Never commits us to eliminate all avoidable waste from the construction, demolition and excavation phases of our projects. Where waste is unavoidable, it will be recovered at the highest possible level of the waste hierarchy.

In 2025, we more than halved absolute construction waste compared with our 2018 baseline — surpassing our original 2025 mid‑strategy target by a significant margin. This milestone demonstrates the impact of our consistent focus on waste elimination, resource efficiency and the early adoption of circular economy principles. It also shows that as we move into the second half of our Now or Never strategy, we are ahead of where we expected to be and accelerating toward our 2030 ambition.

Throughout the year, our efforts centred on eliminating waste at source, lowering our consumption of natural resources and moving further away from a linear ‘take‑make‑dispose’ model. Having already captured the earlier, more straightforward reductions, the next phase of progress requires a more transformative shift.

Going forward, we will focus on embedding circular economy thinking across our projects — redesigning processes, materials and supply chains to prevent waste, and reduce our reliance on virgin resources. This shift will guide how we plan, deliver and operate our projects, ensuring we utilise every stage of the waste hierarchy to its fullest.

Construction Waste

By 2030,we will eliminate all avoidable construction waste and any non-hazardous unavoidable waste will be diverted from landfill.

Construction Waste performance

During 2025, all our projects continued to create bespoke construction waste elimination plans, which include absolute waste reduction targets.

Based on verified, automated records, we reduced absolute reduction in construction waste by 51% compared with our 2018 baseline - exceeding our original 30% reduction target. Our construction waste intensity (relative to turnover) also reduced by 41% in 2025.

In 2024, we switched to a new environmental reporting system, maximising electronic capture of data from our waste supply chain and improving accuracy. We also, changed our metric from volume (m³) to weight (tonnes) as this is a more accurate way to capture our waste data. We have re-baselined our Now or Never performance and will continue to only report in tonnes.

2025 Construction waste weight and intensity

(Previous reporting methodology; Construction waste volume and intensity)

Reuse and Recycling

We have identified timber and plasterboard waste as top contributors to our waste footprint and our focus is on reducing them. In 2025 we continued to strengthen our partnership with the Pallet Loop to re-use and repair pallets from our sites. The Pallet Loop has collected 14,500 pallets from over 70 Willmott Dixon construction sites across the UK, diverting them from traditional wood skips. By working with Pallet Loop, we’ve reduced wood waste from our sites by 3,000m³ tonnes, resulting in a 16,000kg fall in carbon emissions from our operations in 2025 and saved £74,000 in waste disposal costs.

We worked with Protec’s Proplex closed loop scheme to prevent protection material from going to waste by remanufacturing it into new sheets. At our Chiltern Vale project 2,560kg of protection sheets were collected and diverted from landfill, helping us to save nine tonnes of CO₂.

We worked with social enterprise Community Wood Recycling to remove 271 tonnes of wood waste from the waste stream across our sites, reusing 79 tonnes, recycling 135 tonnes and processing 57 tonnes into firewood. The partnership cut our CO₂ emissions from waste wood by 135 tonnes in 2023. And local people benefitted too, with 2.7 paid jobs created by the scheme and five people trained.

Digital and AI-enabled waste reporting

Following our 2024 transition to BRE’s SmartWaste waste reporting tool, 2025 has been our first full year of live, automated waste data capture across the portfolio. SmartWaste is now used across all Willmott Dixon sites to record waste movements, excavation materials and demolition outputs, and the platform enable automating data flows from our waste partners.

As a result, nearly 60% of waste tickets in 2025 were captured automatically, improving the speed, consistency and reliability of our dataset and freeing up project teams to focus on prevention and reuse. This higher‑quality data is enabling more precise performance reporting.

Alongside the benefits that automation through SmartWaste has brought, we also trialled a new system called Qflow, which is an app-based software that allows users to digitally upload photos of the tickets. Qflow uses AI to extract the data and populate an online portal, thereby reducing the time spent by our teams having to manually enter information.

Our project team saved 180 hours by using this system and recorded a 100% compliance with material legislation through effective tracking and auditing. As well as improving accuracy, these systems give us much clearer visibility of material flows, supporting our Scope 3 reduction strategy and enabling earlier intervention to prevent waste.

Non-hazardous construction waste diverted from landfill

We are committed to reducing the amount of non-hazardous construction waste that goes to landfill. Our target is that by 2030, 100% of our non-hazardous demolition waste will be recovered at the highest possible level of the waste hierarchy. In 2025, we maintained a strong performance. We have meticulous segregation and disposal procedures in place to mitigate environmental risks and optimise opportunities to recycle and reuse these materials, often on the site itself.

Demolition and Excavation Waste

Demolition and excavation waste encompass a broad range of materials originating from the dismantling of existing structures and the digging of new foundations. Demolition waste includes concrete, bricks, metals, timber and plastics whereas excavation waste is primarily soil, rock and other natural materials. Because these materials may contain hazardous substances from asbestos to lead paint, sustainable waste management depends on proper management of these waste streams.

We have meticulous segregation and disposal procedures in place to mitigate environmental risks and optimise opportunities to recycle and reuse these materials, which can often be used again in the construction phase.

• By 2030 we will reuse 100% of non-hazardous excavation arising from our sites as a material where technically and practicably possible (either onsite or offsite).

• Where we are required to carry out demolition or excavation work on our projects, our goal is to minimise waste sent to landfill.

Standout examples of our approach to resource management in 2025:

At Dorset Police’s new headquarters at Winfrith, the site team devised a plan to avoid sending excavated material to landfill, reusing 4,661 tonnes of soil to create landscaped mounds nearby and sending nothing landfill (below). That choice avoided about 210 lorry trips (13,440 km) to the nearest landfill, prevented c.4,000 kg of CO₂ from transport, and saved roughly £65,000 in disposal and haulage costs, turning a waste stream into a resource for the site.

At Hounsome Fields Primary School (below), we processed 3,500m³ of excavated material (c.7,700 tonnes), which had been identified for reuse from the pre-construction stage, planned and delivered under the CL:AIRE Definition of Waste: Development Industry Code of Practice (DoWCoP).

At Ty Darren, we partnered with Ashfield solutions and ensured 309m³ of material (c.680 tonnes) was reused on site (below). This avoided 74 dump truck movements saving us £15,000.

Exeter College's new Centre for Law and Social Sciences celebrated its 'topping out' milestone in April.

Here, we embedded circular economy principles by sending 1,748 tonnes of demolition waste to a local farm to help improve their infrastructure. This was done via a U1 exemption, which is an environmental Agency approval for other businesses to use waste material for construction projects without needing a full permit. The material that was reused equated to carbon savings of 44 tonnes, equivalent to the planting of 752 trees grown over 10 years.

Our focus for 2026

Going forward, we will develop our circular economy approach:

We will continue to shift from a 'managing waste' mindset to viewing all materials as 'valuable resources'.

We will embed circular economy thinking in design, specification and procurement.

By partnering with the Supply Chain Sustainability School we will improving Scope 3 transparency.

We will continue to work with our highest carbon producing partners to reduce and accurately report carbon within the supply chain during 2026.