Great Forest joined sustainability and green building professionals from around the world at the 2025 Greenbuild Conference & Expo in November to discuss zero waste and the future of the built environment. With roughly 15,000 attendees and more than 100 sessions, this year’s event highlighted the momentum driving the green building movement forward.
At What’s Next for Zero Waste?: The Future of Materials Management, Anna Dengler, Great Forest’s senior sustainability advisor, took the stage with Holly Griffith from the U.S. Green Building Council and Stefan Moedritzer from Google to explore how organizations can rethink materials, systems, and strategies to reduce waste and improve outcomes.
Here are our three most critical takeaways from this forward-looking conversation.
Zero Waste Insights You Need to Know From Greenbuild 2025
#1 Low-Tech Human Solutions Are Beating AI (For Now)
While Artificial Intelligence is helping material recovery facilities (MRFs) become more efficient at sorting and more responsive to market forces, we are seeing a disconnect at the point of disposal within buildings and businesses. Technology to help people decide what goes in which bin is still lagging, and recycling contamination remains a major problem, with many recyclables lost to the landfill.
The surprising solution? Low-tech waste sorting by hand, which is labor-intensive, but can produce fast results at a fraction of the cost of more complex solutions, ensuring recyclables are recovered and streams are clean. This manual process is a key step to zero waste.
What this means for your business:
Businesses that implement manual sorting can increase their waste diversion rate by 15 to 35 percent, making it one of the quickest ways to reach the 90 percent diversion goal for zero waste.
#2 Rethink Compostable Plastics
The capacity for organic waste diversion, such as commercial composting, has increased significantly over the past decade. However, the panel agreed that the accompanying rise in compostable plastics is not the best sustainable solution.
While compostable options are getting better every day, they still pose multiple problems and may actually increase waste due to confusion and improper processing. Many compostable products are discarded with trash, and even if they are diverted, they will likely be rejected by commercial composting facilities and end up in the landfill.
What this means for your business:
Focus on a more zero waste-friendly solution by championing reuse or recycling over single-use compostable plastics. This is a more reliable way to reduce waste and your material footprint.
#3 The Return of Refillables
An old idea is making a comeback: using refillable containers similar to milk bottles used in the past century. Currently, only about 29% of plastic beverage bottles are recycled in the U.S., with most ending up in the landfill.
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws for packaging are beginning to pop up across the country, starting with California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington. These regulatory actions are designed to encourage both using recycled content and switching to reusable, refillable containers.
Internationally, countries like Germany are further along in their drive to encourage zero waste and circularity. Since 2023, it has been mandatory for most German restaurants and cafes to offer reusable alternatives to single-use containers, and supermarket chains in the country have also piloted systems where customers can refill their own containers with products like shampoo.
What this means for your business:
Prepare for a circular future by evaluating refillable container options for your business’s bathrooms, breakrooms, cafeterias or retail operations. Staying ahead of regulatory changes and embracing reuse will be key to long-term sustainability.
Learn more
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