City of Boston studying how to build a market around selling discarded construction materials

The demolition of the Riverview Condominiums in Cambridge on April 1. The structure was reduced to nothing, with the debris being trucked to a landfill in Ohio.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

When some contractors see trash as they rip the guts out of an old building, Andrew Thompson sees treasure.

Now, the Wu administration is seeing the value as well. City officials have hired the nonprofit Thompson leads, Boston Building Resources, to study what kind of market can be developed to reuse unwanted materials in deconstruction and demolition projects. The administration is paying $50,000 for the study, and plans to include this in its broader climate action plan due to be released on Monday.

It could be the first step toward a construction materials reuse ordinance for buildings of a certain size or age in Boston — like what’s happened in several other cities such as Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Portland, Ore. The hope is to lessen the construction sector’s carbon footprint, particularly because most of these materials are now trucked out of state to be dumped in a landfill. (City officials say Boston produces an estimated 640,000 tons of construction and demolition waste each year.)

For now, though, city officials are just looking for data, not drawing up an ordinance. The Wu administration is looking to collect information on at least 20 demolition and renovation sites through the end of the year. The goal is to develop a set of best practices for the industry by early 2027.

Participants will get free technical assistance from Boston Building Resources, including a rundown of the reusable materials — possibly anything from old fridges to metal door frames — at a construction site, and a materials management plan. City officials are picking construction projects on a rolling basis, but are also looking to get a representative sample of different kinds of buildings. (Office-to-residential conversions would be good candidates, for example.)

Boston Building Resources removes donated materials from deconstruction sites, and also sells it to contractors and homeowners out of its Roxbury store. Now, city officials are hoping to expand on what that nonprofit has been doing for decades.

“We are looking to figure out what the city can do to help build more of a market,” Thompson said. “This is not going to happen because of a regulation alone.”