Calls for a more sustainable construction industry are everywhere. Soon, we can answer.

We hear that buildings must use less carbon, generate less waste, and provide better data transparency. Yet each of these goals depends on the same underlying question: How are buildings made? The construction industry has spent decades debating outcomes (waste, emissions, affordability) while leaving its production system largely untouched. The result is that reform has been aimed at the symptoms of a deeper disorder and not systemic improvement.

North American buildings have been realized with the Engineer-to-Order (ETO) delivery model for centuries; every project remains a one-off prototype. Designs, contracts, and approvals are re-invented from scratch, and supply chains are reorganized for each new job. This fragmentation makes improvement impossible to compound. We learned a major block to standardization in What Modularity Really Means — that no shared interfaces means we cannot share repeating products. Related, service-based legal agreements mean no scalable marketplaces. Each project remains its own island — isolated from the next, incapable of sustained learning, compounding process improvement, or meaningful progress. The construction sector’s chronic inefficiency is not a matter of people, effort, or ethics; in ETO, it is structured to block progress.

That structure contrasts sharply with the industries to which construction is unfavorably compared. Critics are correct when they say “construction is wasteful” — but only because they measure it against manufacturing sectors that have already aggregated demand, centralized production, and built the feedback systems that drive efficiency. In automotive or electronics manufacturing, repetition creates knowledge. Stable components produce stable data. Production lines reveal waste, invite experimentation, and capture every improvement in the next iteration. Construction, by contrast, resets to zero after every build. Its easier to throw cut-offs into a dumpster than order a recycling service. New teams never benefits from their hard-earned experiences.

The shift to Configure-to-Order (CTO) is the missing means to sustainability.

CTO introduces digital and physical interfaces that allow different players to make compatible components within an organized marketplace. These interfaces become the connective tissue between design and manufacturing, between regulation and commerce. Once they exist — and are recognized by contract and code — demand can aggregate to studied production facilities. Factories can specialize with stable teams, protocols, and methods. Data can flow horizontally across firms. Knowledge can finally compound.

When production consolidates around repeatable components, sustainability becomes measurable and actionable. Waste can be recycled at the source because materials move through a stable, monitored environment. Lean production disciplines (kanban, kaizen, jidoka) can be applied to real buildings, not theoretical ones. A wall panel or kitchen pod can carry a verified bill of materials and embodied-carbon score, allowing apples-to-apples comparison across projects. Carbon accounting ceases to be a research exercise and becomes part of everyday procurement.

Many current reform movements (circular construction, mass-timber certification, carbon transparency) seek to improve outcomes without re-designing the system that produces them. But a system that resets to zero cannot learn. CTO reorganizes that system so learning accumulates. It provides the structure through which sustainability initiatives can actually compound instead of remaining one-off demonstrations.

At the Center for Offsite Construction, we regard this structural shift as the precondition for every major reform the industry desires. Less waste, lower carbon, and greater transparency are not isolated goals; they are consequences of a more organized way of making. To achieve them, construction must do what every mature industry has already done: stabilize its interfaces, align its legal instruments, and allow production itself to learn. Sustainability begins not with materials, but with the system that connects them.