Lauren-Richardson-Sustainability-Associate-Green-Badger-1

by Lauren Richardson
Sustainability Manager at Green Badger

How LEED v5 Materials Credits connect to the circular economy movement, reshaping the region

A circular economy is a system designed to keep materials in use for as long as possible rather than discarding them.

In the traditional model, things follow a straight line: you take raw materials, make a product, use it, and throw it in the landfill. That’s it, the material is gone.

In a circular economy, that line becomes a loop. When a product reaches the end of its life, its materials are recovered and used again, either by repairing or reusing the original product, recycling them into something new, or passing them on to someone else who can use them.

The goal is simple: waste as little as possible, for as long as possible.

In construction, this looks like

Reusing an old building instead of tearing it down and building new
Salvaging materials from demolition so they go into the next project
Recycling concrete, steel, and wood instead of sending them to a landfill
Designing new buildings so that their materials can be recovered easily at the end of their life

The circular economy isn’t just an environmental idea; it’s also an economic one. Materials that stay in use have value. Materials that go to landfill… don’t.

LEED v5 has three materials credits to guide construction projects in embracing a circular economy. MRc1: Building and Material Reuse and MRc3: Construction and Demolition Waste Management and MRc4: Building Product Selection and Procurement.

Wait — What Counts Where?

This trips everyone up, so here’s the cheat sheet taken from Green Badger’s Ultimate Guide to LEED v5 Construction:

Materials reused on-site → count toward MRc1 Material Reuse
Materials salvaged and sent elsewhere for reuse → count toward MRc5 C&D Waste Diversion
Products with ecolabels showing circular economy attributes (Cradle to Cradle, recycled content, takeback programs) → count toward MRc4 Building Product Selection and Procurement

MRc1: Building and Material Reuse

LEED v5 MRc1 — Building and Material Reuse
Credit Intents	Keep existing building materials in use longer. Reduce the need for new materials and the environmental cost of making them.

These credit rewards two things: keeping parts of an existing building standing, and using salvaged materials from other projects.

The first path gives points for retaining an existing structure rather than tearing it down. Converting a warehouse into offices or a factory into apartments preserves the energy and carbon already embedded in those buildings. Keeping a concrete frame standing avoids all the emissions that would come from demolishing it and pouring a new one.

The second path rewards specifying salvaged or reclaimed materials such as reclaimed lumber, salvaged brick, reused steel, and recovered flooring. The key distinction is that salvaged materials are reused as-is, without being reprocessed into something new. That is a higher-value outcome than recycling, and LEED v5 treats it that way.

To pursue MRc1, project teams should:

Conduct a pre-demolition audit early in the design phase to identify what can be kept or salvaged before demolition contracts are written.
Document where the salvaged materials came from.
Get contractors involved early, since careful deconstruction takes more time than conventional demolition and needs to be priced accordingly.
Calculate salvaged materials at replacement value, not purchase price, for the LEED calculation.

Sample salvage assessments are available through the City of Seattle,11 the City of Shoreline,12 and the City of Edmonds nbsnseattle.org

LEED v5 MRc3 — Construction and Demolition Waste Management
Credit Intent	Keep construction and demolition waste out of landfills by recovering, reusing, and recycling materials.

Construction and demolition waste is a massive problem. MRc3 encourages project teams to divert as much of that material as possible. Points are awarded based on how much is diverted, and a certain percentage of materials streams must be source-separated at the site. Diversion can occur through on-site reuse, donation, sale to other projects, recycling, or composting. LEED v5 favors reuse over recycling, and recycling over energy recovery.

In v5, it’s not enough to show that materials left the site in a recycling bin. Teams must demonstrate where materials actually ended up. This closes a gap from earlier versions where materials counted as diverted sometimes ended up landfilled anyway after sorting failed.

The credit is not asking where the waste truck went. It is asking where the material ended up.

The Southeast Is Changing How It Thinks About Waste

Something is shifting across the American Southeast. From Charlotte to Savannah to Miami, communities and organizations are treating waste as a resource, not just a problem to manage. They are reusing old buildings, salvaging historic materials, and diverting construction debris from landfills.

The credits only work if there are real projects and real infrastructure to point to. Across the Southeast, commercial developers, contractors, and nonprofits are doing exactly the work that LEED v5 rewards. Here are some examples:

Ponce City Market, Atlanta, GA — Large-Scale Commercial Building Reuse

Ponce City Market is the largest adaptive reuse project in Atlanta’s history. This 2.1-million-square-foot conversion of a former Sears Roebuck warehouse and distribution facility was converted into a mixed-use commercial campus with office, retail, restaurant, and residential space. The project pursued LEED Core & Shell Silver certification and set high sustainability goals for waste and efficiency throughout construction.

Rather than demolishing the existing structure, the design team retained the building’s original 370 concrete support columns, approximately 400,000 square feet of original hardwood floors, and thousands of exterior windows. This is building reuse in action: the embodied carbon and material value of a massive industrial structure preserved intact rather than crushed and carted away.

Westside Paper, Atlanta, GA — Industrial Warehouse to Commercial Campus

At 950 West Marietta Street in West Midtown Atlanta, the 70-year-old Atlanta Paper Company warehouse (a 1950s industrial facility that once supplied packaging to Coca-Cola) has been adapted into a 245,000-square-foot mixed-use commercial campus with office, retail, and restaurant tenants. Designed by Perkins&Will, the project preserved the building’s industrial bones while making bold architectural interventions: cutting through the warehouse mass to introduce light and pedestrian access, and building new office space above the existing structure.

The project demonstrates how selective deconstruction of non-retained elements, combined with source-separated recycling of industrial building materials, supports strong diversion performance on a large commercial site.

Camp North End, Charlotte, NC — Former Ford Plant as Commercial Reuse Model

Camp North End is one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the United States: a 76-acre former Ford Model T assembly plant (1924) and subsequent U.S. Army warehouse in Charlotte’s North End, transformed into a mixed-use commercial campus with over 500,000 square feet of office and retail space. The project is recognized as Charlotte’s largest intact historic industrial site that preserved existing structural fabric rather than demolishing and rebuilding from scratch.

Original industrial buildings have been converted into storefronts and creative office space. Salvaged materials from the site, including steel rebar from excavated fuel tanks, repurposed as public art, illustrate how commercial deconstruction generates both compliance-ready salvaged material and community value. The project’s phased approach, retaining more of the original campus with each phase, models how large commercial sites can pursue building reuse credit incrementally.

Re:Purpose Savannah, GA — Commercial Deconstruction Supply Chain

Re:Purpose Savannah is a nonprofit that trains women+, including women-identified, trans, non-binary, and other underrepresented people, for careers in construction. The organization deconstructs historic commercial buildings in and around Savannah rather than demolishing them, then processes and resells salvaged materials at its marsh-front lumber yard. Their commercial project portfolio includes the B&B Paint Building (414 MLK Jr. Blvd, a commercial storefront in the Savannah Downtown Historic District dating to 1891), Bull Street Commons (a former furniture store and florist), and the Starland Dairy (an early-20th-century commercial and industrial dairy facility).

In five years, they have diverted an estimated 3,000 tons of material from landfills. For project teams wanting to salvage materials, Re:Purpose offers documentation, an online archive of every deconstructed commercial structure, and compliance-ready materials — dimensional lumber, hardwood flooring, heavy timber, brick, and architectural salvage — with traceable commercial origins. They also run a federally recognized Registered Apprenticeship Program for Deconstruction Technicians, building the skilled-labor pipeline that the regional commercial deconstruction market needs to scale.

Mecklenburg County, NC – Recycling Infrastructure for Commercial Job Sites

Commercial construction projects generate significant volumes of mixed recyclable material, such as drywall, metal framing, cardboard, and concrete, that require reliable end markets to count toward diversion. Mecklenburg County’s investment in modernizing its Materials Recovery Facilities means that mixed streams from commercial job sites in the Charlotte metro are more likely to be successfully sorted and reach verified end markets, rather than being rejected and landfilled after the fact.

Sustain SC — Connecting Commercial Waste Streams to Buyers

For commercial project teams in South Carolina, one of the hardest challenges is finding buyers for specific waste streams — demolition gypsum, commercial ceiling tile, and salvaged structural steel. Sustain SC’s statewide coalition work connects businesses, manufacturers, and government agencies around shared circular economy goals, helping to build the inter-organizational relationships that turn commercial C&D waste into feedstock for regional supply chains rather than landfill tonnage.

Hickory Ridge, GA — Waste-to-Energy as the Last Loop

The Hickory Ridge Landfill in DeKalb County, Georgia, was converted into a 1-megawatt solar energy generation site using flexible photovoltaic panels with methane gas from decomposing waste captured separately for energy in a parallel operation. It illustrates LEED v5’s waste hierarchy at the landscape scale: even materials that could not be reused or recycled are being put to productive use. For commercial project teams, the same logic applies at the job site level — waste-to-energy is a better outcome than landfill, but reuse and recycling come first.

Circularity Best Practices

Plan. Before breaking ground, discuss waste management during the preconstruction phase. The decisions made here — which materials to separate, which haulers to use, which facilities to target — determine what diversion rates are actually achievable.
Source Separation. Start by identifying local vendors who accept individual source-separated material streams: metal, concrete, gypsum board, wood, cardboard, and so on. If demolition is in scope, prioritize recycling the materials with the highest weight and best recyclability first.
Leverage manufacturer take-back programs. Source-separated recycling, off-site reuse, and manufacturer take-back programs can all contribute to meeting minimum source separation percentages and overall diversion of construction waste. Many ceiling tile, carpet, and gypsum manufacturers run take-back programs that accept their own products from job sites, process them in closed-loop operations, and provide diversion documentation.
Reduce waste generation at the design stage. Modular design, prefabrication, and just-in-time material delivery reduce the waste pool that needs to be diverted in the first place.
Ecolabels. In addition to specifying products with high recycled content, look for products that have a Cradle to Cradle certificate – the gold standard of circularity.

Resources

All for Reuse Ecosystem Map: Salvage/deconstruction service providers
Recycling Certification Institute (RCI): certified facilities directory
Green Badger’s Waste Facility Map: an interactive map of recycling facilities by location
Takeback Programs: a list of trusted manufacturers
For a regular dose of circular economy thinking, follow Vojtech Vosecky on LinkedIn. Mr. Vosecky also runs cohorts to help people build fluency in the field.

Conclusion

MRc1, MRc3 and MRc4, which are at the heart of circularity, are simple in concept: keep more of what exists, and divert construction waste from landfills. What makes them hard is execution — finding salvage sources, recycling markets, contractors who know how to deconstruct carefully, and the documentation to back it all up.

The Southeast is building that capacity. Ponce City Market and Westside Paper show what commercial building reuse looks like at scale. Camp North End shows how a large industrial site can be reclaimed incrementally. Re:Purpose Savannah shows how a commercial deconstruction supply chain gets built from the ground up. Mecklenburg County and Sustain SC show how recycling infrastructure and market connections make diversion documentation reliable rather than aspirational.

For sustainability professionals working in the region, the resources are closer than you think. Know where they are, build them into your projects, and use them.