GS Engineering & Construction's in-house platform drives resource recycling at job sites

GS Engineering & Construction is expanding a companywide effort to reuse leftover materials at construction sites and transform waste into new products, building a field-driven resource circulation system across its operations.

The company announced Tuesday that more than 2,000 transactions have been completed across 75 job sites nationwide through Xi-market, an in-house platform that allows workers to share and exchange used office supplies and materials in real time.

Launched in December 2024, Xi-market grew out of an idea from site workers. The concept addressed a recurring problem: newly opened sites buy supplies from scratch while sites nearing completion must pay to dispose of perfectly usable items. The platform connects sites that have surplus goods with those that need them, cutting unnecessary purchases and waste at the same time.

Office and general supplies accounted for the largest share of transactions at about 900 cases, or 46 percent of the total, followed by safety equipment at 450 cases (23 percent) and construction materials at 120 cases (6 percent).

Items that cannot be reused are given new life through upcycling. The effort traces back to a "waste hard hat recycling" idea proposed at an in-house innovation hackathon in 2022. Discarded hard hats have been remade into desks, chairs, nameplates and customer gifts, and the program has since expanded to include site bags made from gang-form safety nets and benches crafted from reclaimed materials. The benches have been donated to veterans' homes and other community welfare facilities.

GS Engineering & Construction estimates that its hard hat upcycling program has cut carbon emissions by roughly 3 metric tons to date — the equivalent of planting about 400 pine trees.

The eco-friendly push aligns with CEO Heo Yun-hong's emphasis on field-driven innovation and sustainable management. The company credits an organizational culture in which site workers identify problems and implement solutions themselves for turning grassroots ideas into established internal systems.

"Construction sites are an area where even small ideas and actions can dramatically reduce resource waste," a company official said. "We will continue to actively uncover voluntary ideas that start on the ground and build an eco-friendly construction culture."

Meanwhile, GS Engineering & Construction posted an operating profit of 232.4 billion won ($171 million) in the first half of this year, up 41.8 percent from 164.2 billion won in the same period last year.