Only a couple of months back I saw what seemed to be perfectly good solar panels (I'd estimate an 8kw system) having a backhoe rip through them (and the roof they were attached to) to make way for a future apartment block.
I'm sure someone would've been willing to salvage those at no cost to the developers, but time is money to those guys. Sad to see such waste.
In the Bay, I more than once saw developers spend months trying to get people to salvage old houses whole. Surely there was someone who would take them! How hard could it be?
Each time they wound up bulldozing them after zero takers were found.
Could they have tried to get rid of them piecemeal, as people came to salvage one useful thing at a time? Definitely possible! Though it likely would have meant managing a bunch of different people looking for specific things, after which they would have had to spend just as much time and money bulldozing the things anyway.
Delays in construction are also waste but not so visceral or visible. It might have turned out that it was cheaper to destroy them than have them salvaged, including the labor cost of managing the salvage.
That requires someone to put in a conscious effort to manage and people are lazy when it's not their money.
Also (thanks in large part to internet commenters, many of whom on HN fit this archetype) people are afraid that a liability waver doesn't cover them when in reality unless there are aggravating circumstances a liability waver pretty much always caps your loss at the consult fee required to get your lawyer to tell the ambulance chaser to f off.
Recycling can only slow the loss of raw materials, not prevent it. So we'll either run out eventually anyway or we won't run out anyway. Your argument doesn't work.
I'm sure someone would've been willing to salvage those at no cost to the developers, but time is money to those guys. Sad to see such waste.