Construction waste is one of the biggest headaches for contractors. Broken blocks, torn drywall, chunks of concrete, leftover plaster and sand all pile up quickly. It is heavy, takes up space and costs contractors large sums of money to transport to landfill sites.
That reality helps explain why makeshift dumping sites, illegal landfills and piles of pirate construction waste appear across the country, and why enforcement against offenders remains so difficult. But what if there were a way to turn trash into cash, or in this case, to turn construction waste into valuable new building materials?
From waste to new building material
That is precisely what Morphit, a technology developed by the Israeli company Rom from the Luzon Group, aims to do. The technology turns construction waste from a discarded liability into building materials, including blocks, panels and partitions.
Morphit makes it possible to produce strong and durable construction materials, both building mixtures and finished products such as blocks, panels, walls and partitions. One major advantage sets it apart from earlier recycling methods. The process does not require sorting or separating the waste by type.
Ariel Abram, Rom’s CEO, says he often sees construction projects in Tel Aviv surrounded by enormous piles of debris. “That image is burned into my mind as something that makes no sense. It does not fit our era,” he said. “We are constantly looking for ways to become more efficient, to work in a more modern and greener way.
“We wanted to change this sense of inevitability around construction waste, so we entered the world of recycling and reusing the massive quantities of waste that, ironically, we also pay millions of shekels every year to bury,” he explained.
That search led to a partnership with the consulting firm Practical Innovation, which helped launch early experiments in recycling construction waste. “We took all kinds of waste, crushed it and tried to understand what we needed to do to create a new building material,” Abram said.
The results are visible in the finished products. Crushed material is transformed into partitions, walls and bricks. “The major challenge we overcame is that for years people talked about reusing construction waste, but it always required sorting,” Abram said. “Here, we used all types of waste without separation and still achieved very strong results across all parameters.”
Practical Innovation
Practical Innovation advises and supports companies in traditional industrial sectors, including food, beverages, agriculture, cosmetics and construction, helping them adopt innovative methods suited to advanced market conditions and new growth engines.
According to Yael Hirsch Shemesh, the company’s head of development, the collaboration with Rom was a model process. “We carried out a very strong waste treatment process together,” she said. “We build teams of experts in relevant fields and develop the product with them.”
In this case, development was carried out with the Plastics and Rubber Center, led by Prof. Anna Dotan, a senior researcher at the center, an associate professor in the Department of Polymer Materials Engineering at Shenkar College, and head of sustainability and recycling studies.
“We built a product concept, conducted extensive testing and research, and saw that feasibility was very high,” Hirsch Shemesh said. “From the laboratory compounds, we obtained a material that met the performance requirements we set.”
The process includes crushing construction materials, mixing them with binding agents and water, and then casting them into molds to create blocks, panels and similar products. The finished components contain up to 80% recycled construction waste, an exceptionally high proportion. The recycled components also meet strength tests comparable to those of conventional building materials.
One key advantage of the new panels is that they do not require aluminum framing, which is standard in drywall construction today. According to Hirsch Shemesh, the panel itself is built with a special internal structure that saves time and money during construction and allows the panels to be dismantled and reused, something not possible with existing drywall technology.
An industry in urgent need of change
According to European Union data, the construction industry is responsible for more than one third of all waste generated in Europe and over 40% of carbon emissions. Data from Israel’s Environmental Protection Ministry show that in 2024, 7.5 million tons of construction waste were sent to landfills in Israel, at high cost and with significant environmental damage.
Despite this, there has been no efficient and affordable solution for recycling construction waste, and the situation is even more complex. A substantial portion of construction debris never reaches landfill or recycling sites at all. Instead, it is dumped illegally, often generating quick profits for transport contractors.
A significant portion of construction waste never reaches landfill sites but is dumped along the way, as hauling contractors make quick profits
Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman has published optimistic figures claiming illegal dumping has dropped to just 10%, but an investigation by the website Shakuf found that professionals estimate illegal dumping may account for as much as 50% of total construction waste.
Smarter recycling could incentivize all players to transport waste to recycling facilities through financial rewards, similar to Israel’s bottle deposit law. For the past decade, the Environmental Protection Ministry has promoted a Construction Waste Law designed to provide incentives and impose sanctions to curb illegal dumping, but the legislation remains stalled in the Knesset.
In the meantime, questions remain about the waste that does reach landfills. According to ministry data, 61% of construction waste sent to recycling sites is marketed back to the construction sector as raw materials. In most cases, however, this involves simple crushing rather than the creation of finished recycled building products.
Several recycling facilities already produce cement mixtures and filling materials from construction waste, including sites operated by Green Mix and a plant run by Readymix-Stang Recycle, owned by Mexico-based CEMEX, which began operating last year at the Hiriya recycling park.
The challenge is that many construction companies still prefer to buy new materials rather than recycled ones. That is where Morphit’s advantage lies. Instead of offering only raw mixtures, it delivers finished construction products.
Asked about claims that 90% of construction waste in Israel is already landfilled or recycled, Abram said he was unfamiliar with those figures. “I think Israel is among the less advanced countries in this field,” he said. “Everyone talks about the massive scale of illegal construction waste here. We are very far from those numbers.”
A new path forward
Rom, founded in 1991 as a finishing works contractor, is today the main contracting arm of the Luzon Group, which also operates Dori Construction. Morphit represents a new direction for the company.
The project is currently transitioning from research and development to regulatory approvals, standards certification and commercial production. Options under review include in-house manufacturing, partnerships with other producers or licensing the technology abroad.
Abram said the company has focused on maintaining competitive pricing. “Although we see globally that people are willing to pay more for green products, we estimate with high confidence that prices will not be higher and our goal is for them to be lower,” he said. While international markets, particularly Europe, are a key target, Rom also plans to integrate the products into projects in Israel. “Awareness of green construction and recycling is much higher in Europe, and there is openness to new ideas,” Abram said. “This technology was born from our day-to-day operations and a real need, not just ideology. As a company building hundreds of millions of shekels worth of projects each year, we have a platform to integrate these materials ourselves.”
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A construction site in Rishon LeZion. Perhaps one day we will see true green construction implemented in Israel as well
(Photo: Dana Kopel)
Beyond construction, the recycled material could support entirely new applications. “With a designer’s or architect’s eye, you can develop ideas that were never possible before,” Abram said. “The real news here is the technology itself, the ability to take waste and turn it into something else. It could be partitions, blocks, furniture, flooring. The adjustments are possible. The breakthrough is taking waste away from landfills and reusing it without sorting. That is the real innovation.”