South Australia’s trailblazing answer to construction’s waste.

A South Australian insulation professional is helping to reduce environmental strain and minimising the costs of home construction projects.

Joe Golotta is the Adelaide business owner and brains behind Pre-Cycle, a business built around recycling and re-purposing leftover building materials. Not only does Australia’s demolition and construction industry account for 7.1 megatons of landfill waste each year, but home construction sites feel the financial squeeze of waste disposal. The latter of which being the catalyst for Golotta’s latest business venture.[1]

“It all started when one of my builders basically said, ‘I’m sick and tired of all your insulation waste filling my bins’,” said the Premier Insulation owner, during an interview with The Lead.

“For the cost of $400-500 dollars to empty a bin, it was costing them a fortune because they would have to empty a bin just for my insulation. So they came to me and asked ‘can you do anything about it?’”

A year and a half later and Golotta had launched Pre-Cycle, a company that solves the costly problem of construction waste disposal and champions sustainability through repurposing left-over construction material. His operation is as simple as it is effective.

For a small fee (paid by the builder), the Pre-Cycle is as follows:

  • After each of the six stages of construction, the builder leaves the excess materials in a pile which is then collected by the team at Pre-Cycle
  • The offcuts are then taken to the Pre-Cycle warehouse where they are redistributed to various companies to repurpose, reuse or recycle

According to The Lead, the typical house construction can use up to half a dozen six cubic-metre bins, costing up to $3,000. The environmentally-conscious SA business can reduce landfill-destined waste to only one bin and for less than the cost of a single six-cubic metre bin, remove and redirect the remaining usable off-cuts.

Golotta has found the perfect intersection of environmental sustainability, keeping costs down for our tradies and building a profitable business who, as the company gains traction, will be able to provide employment opportunities to the community.

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Written by Amelia Fynes-Clinton for Globe Group


[1] B Carbone, ‘Precycling in construction industry saves money and environment’, The Lead South Australia, 17 October 2018, available from https://theleadsouthaustralia.com.au/environment/precycling-in-construction-industry-saves-money-and-environment/, viewed 08 November 2018.