Builders
- Less levy, because sorted streams stay out of landfill
- One footprint and one truck instead of a row of skips
- A cleaner, safer site at every stage inspection
- Tonnes per home, by stream, for council plans and sustainability reporting
BuildBin. Every material. Sorted on site.
One recycling station on every new home site. Eight streams in one footprint, each bay sized to what a house build actually throws out.
44%
of Australia's waste comes from construction and demolition.
Your Home, Australian Government$177.19
a tonne. Victoria's metro landfill levy from 1 July 2026, on top of the gate fee.
EPA Victoria8 in 1
Eight separated streams, one station, one hook-lift truck to change it over.
BuildBin station designThe problem with one big skip
A mixed skip is a sorting job you pay someone else to do. Or nobody does.
- It all gets mixedPlasterboard, timber, cardboard and brick go in together. Once it's mixed, every tonne is harder and dearer to recover.
- It gets wetAn open skip in the rain ruins plasterboard and cardboard for recycling. Polystyrene and wrap blow down the street.
- The levy lands on youWhatever ends up in landfill carries the state levy, and that rises every year.
- Separate skips don't fitYour Home recommends separate, labelled recycling skips. A narrow estate block rarely has room for more than one.
Eight bays. One station. Every home.
A weatherproof, hook-lift station that sits on the lot from slab to handover. Trades drop each material into its numbered bay. Spin it, or tap a bay to see what goes in.
Loading 3D station…
Drag to turn · tap a bay
- Footprint
- 6.3 × 2.45 m
- Usable volume
- About 25 m³ in 8 pods
- Loading height
- Flap sill 1.22 m off the ground
- Change-over
- One hook-lift truck
- Security
- One-tap locks, 3 sensor lights, scheduled alarm
How it's emptied
At the facility the roof lifts off in one piece on four lifting eyes. Every bay is a removable pod that carries its own flaps, so it lifts out closed, gets weighed, tipped onto its own pile and dropped back in. Nothing spills and the streams never meet.
Change the bay sizes
Each side is a grid of ten 622 mm modules, and a pod can be one to six modules long. To give an estate more room for bricks or cardboard, swap the pods around and move the number plates. The body stays the same.
Locked, lit and alarmed
The supervisor locks or unlocks all eight bays at once from a phone over Bluetooth, and every opening is logged. Three motion-sensor lights cover both sides and the rear after dark, and an alarm arms itself for the hours you set, say 6 pm to 6 am and weekends. A manual override covers a flat phone or battery.
Concept design, modelled in Blender. Final dimensions, hook height, weight limits and the lock, light and alarm hardware are confirmed with the fabricator. Read the fabricator spec.
Size bins by weight and you get it backwards.
Bricks and concrete are the heaviest thing a new home throws out, but they barely take up room. Cardboard weighs almost nothing and fills a skip. Bins fill by space, so we sized every bay by space.
Lid off, from above. Each bay's length is its share of the loose volume a new home produces, rounded to whole 622 mm modules so bays can be resized by swapping pods. The smallest bays are one module long so they can still be loaded by hand.
7.7 tsurplus material
41 m³loose volume
2.0station change-overs
That's about seven 6 m³ skips of mixed waste, or about two BuildBin change-overs, already sorted.
Everyone on the job comes out ahead.
The value comes from never mixing the waste in the first place. Sorted at the source, each stream is worth more and costs less to deal with.
Trades
- One place to drop everything, right at the lot
- Numbered bays, so there's no guessing
- No end-of-job sort, no tip runs in the ute
- A clear standard to meet, like any finish
Homebuyers
- Less spent on waste means less built into the price
- A home built by a builder that recycles to a standard
- A recycling record for their home at handover Proposed
The street
- No polystyrene and wrap blowing across the estate
- Fewer truck movements per home
- More timber, plasterboard, cardboard and steel back into use
One home. One station.
The station arrives at slab and leaves at handover. Every lot on the estate runs the same system, so every trade learns it once.
Illustrative image
What BuildBin keeps out of landfill, and off your bill.
Put in your build volume. The estimate counts the levy you avoid on material that's recovered instead of landfilled. Disposal and service pricing is set in the pilot, so it isn't included here.
$0levy avoided a year
| Per home | A year | |
|---|---|---|
| Surplus material | ||
| Extra tonnes kept out of landfill | ||
| Levy avoided | ||
| Loose volume |
Estimate only. Uses 32.2 kg of surplus per m² of floor area (a measured rate for single-storey detached homes in New Zealand; Australian brick-veneer homes may run higher) and the BuildBin material split. Levy rates from EPA Victoria and the Queensland Government. Gate fees, hire and transport aren't included.
Every trade finishes to a standard. Now they recycle to one.
A plasterer doesn't get paid until the wall meets the finish level in the contract. BuildBin works the same way. Builders write the BuildBin Standard into every subcontract, and recycling gets checked at each stage like any other work.
Finish standardBuildBin Standard
Written into the subcontractWritten into the subcontract
Checked at stage inspectionBays checked at stage inspection
Defects rectified at the trade's costContamination sorted or charged back
Sign-off before paymentRecycling sign-off with the stage claim
Your Home, the Australian Government's sustainable building guide, tells builders to use written contracts with all trades that include waste minimisation clauses. The BuildBin Standard is that clause, ready to use.
Illustrative image
BuildBin Standard: subcontract clause (summary)
- The subcontractor places all surplus material and waste from its work into the matching numbered bay of the BuildBin station on the lot.
- Material goes in clean: no food, liquids or other streams mixed in. Cardboard is flattened. Plasterboard and cardboard are kept dry.
- No site waste leaves the lot in the subcontractor's vehicle, except by agreement with the site supervisor.
- Contamination found at stage inspection is a defect. The subcontractor sorts it, or pays the sorting cost.
- Asbestos, chemicals, paint, liquids and other hazardous waste never go in the station.
Slab
Concrete and steel offcuts, formwork timber, plastic. Bays 06, 08, 02, 01
Frame
Framing offcuts and pallets. Bay 02
Lock-up
Brick and tile breakage, roofing offcuts, wrap. Bays 06, 08, 01
Fixing
Plasterboard, cornice and packaging. Bays 03, 04, 05
Completion
Appliance and fitting packaging, final clean. Bays 04, 05, 07
Built on the Australian Government's own advice.
Your Home is the Australian Government's guide to sustainable homes. Its waste minimisation advice for builders reads like a brief for BuildBin.
Plan for waste separation and sorting on site during construction.
BuildBin separates at the source. Eight streams are sorted where they're made, never mixed.
Provide recycling skips and colour code or label waste skips and protect them from contamination, rain and wind.
One station does all of that. Numbered, labelled bays under a weatherproof lid, on one footprint.
Use written contracts with all trades that include clauses requiring waste minimisation.
The BuildBin Standard is a ready-made subcontract clause.
Negotiate recycling paybacks with local resource recovery firms.
Recycle Group processes the streams. Who gets the value of recovered material is set out in the pilot agreement.
Quotes from Your Home, Waste minimisation (yourhome.gov.au). BuildBin is an independent Recycle Group initiative. It isn't endorsed by or affiliated with the Australian Government. See how BuildBin lines up with Your Home
Start with a pilot on real homes.
No long contract up front. We run BuildBin on a set of your homes next to your current skips, weigh everything, and report back.
- Site check
We confirm where the station sits on your standard lot and driveway.
- Baseline
We record what your current skips cost and recover, so there's something to compare with.
- Station on at slab
The station arrives with the slab pour and stays until handover.
- Trade induction
A one-page sheet and a five-minute walk-through for supervisors and trades.
- Weighed change-overs
Each bay is weighed at our facility, so every tonne is recorded by stream.
- Pilot report
Tonnes recovered, contamination, cost against your baseline, and what to change.
Talk to us about a pilot.
Tell us roughly how many homes you build and where. We'll come back to set up a site check.