Foreword

The notion of using the site and surrounding area as the first place to look for resources is unfamiliar and foreign to most current designers. But in the past, and in some parts of the world even today, discarding materials was not an option, as new materials were expensive or not easily available, and innovation included working creatively with materials that had a past life.

In any urban society there is a massive stock of available materials from demolition and industrial waste that is currently discarded but has potential value. Although the infrastructure to locate and use these resources is currently lacking, some industry leaders are establishing design strategies, material recovery processes, construction management approaches and manufacturing systems to create innovative new ways of using them in the built environment. This book explores the creative opportunities and practical aspects of this gradual move to a more circular way of thinking about material resources in the built environment. In particular, the focus is on reuse of materials and components, including both construction salvage and waste streams from other industries.

In The Science of the Artificial, Herbert Simon describes design as ‘the process by which we devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’. If we wish to create a more ecologically based built environment, we need not only to design more sustainable buildings but, more fundamentally, to devise a system and infrastructure that will achieve this. This is what this book is working towards.

Acknowledgements

The book is dedicated to my wonderful and supportive family, Grazyna, Krysia, Adam and Stefan – thank you.

Thanks go to all the various architects, designers, builders and others who have provided information, images, comments, edits, ideas and help in compiling the case studies and practitioner examples in this book. I am also grateful to Sandra Wojtecki for her help in compiling some of the case studies.

Definitions

Circular Economy refers to a closed-loop model of an economy where waste is eliminated and product are sold, consumed, collected and then reused, remade into new products, returned as nutrients to the environment or incorporated into global energy flows.

Cradle to Cradle (also referred to as C2C) models human industry on nature's processes viewing materials as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms and separates these into technical and biological nutrients.

Deconstruction describes a process of selective disassembly of a building at the end of its life to recover materials and components or systems for potential reuse or recycling. It is an approach to building removal that can extract resources so they can be used for high value future uses.

Design for deconstruction (or disassembly) describes how a building is designed to be readily taken apart at the end of its useful life so that the components can have a second use. To facilitate this, a design team needs to consider how the major systems can be deconstructed during renovations and end-of-life.

Design for durability considers extending the life of a building and its individual components. This can mean choosing long-life components but also creating adaptability in a building as a means to extend its service life and its potential for repurposing.

Diversion (waste diversion, landfill diversion) is the process of diverting waste from landfills or incinerators through various means such as reuse, recycling, composting or gas production through anaerobic digestion. Waste diversion is a key component of effective and sustainable waste management and a major policy objective of many governments.

Embodied energy/carbon is the energy (and resultant carbon emission) used in all the processes necessary to produce a material or component.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach in which a producer is held responsible (physically and/or financially) for a product in the post-consumer stage of a product's life cycle. EPR makes producers consider what will happen to their products after first use and incentivises them to use resources in a way that allows them to have second lives.

Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a comprehensive method for assessing a range of environmental impacts across the full life cycle of a product system, from materials acquisition to manufacturing, use and final disposition. The ISO standard ISO 14040 defines the processes for carrying out LCA calculations.

Linear Economy is a consumption model of an economy where a product is sold, consumed and discarded (take–make–waste).

Reclaim is to recover something of value from a waste stream.

Salvage is typically something extracted from the waste stream as valuable or useful.

Sustainable Materials Management (SMM) is an approach to promote sustainable materials use, integrating actions targeted at reducing negative environmental impacts and preserving natural capital throughout the life cycle of materials, taking into account economic efficiency and social equity.

Virgin materials (also known as primary materials) are resources extracted from nature in their raw form, such as stone, timber or metal ore that have not been previously used or consumed.

Zero Waste is a policy concept that focuses on creating a cyclical system, reducing waste, reusing products and recycling and composting/digesting the rest, with the ultimate goal of eliminating all waste and achieving zero waste to landfill.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end.

(Hannah Arendt¹)

Today buildings are a graveyard for materials – once used they rarely have a further life. We hear that increasing percentages of demolition waste is ‘recycled’, but what value comes from this? Most recycling actually means crushing and use as road base or for other low value uses. Much of the usefulness and financial value is lost. Yet existing buildings and industrial waste streams are huge reservoirs of materials and components that can potentially be mined to provide much needed construction resources. There is increasing recognition that a building at the end of its life is an asset to be valued and that innovation and imaginative design can offer new opportunities for using discarded materials and components as valuable parts of buildings. In the developed world we can learn from ecological systems and from resource strategies in poorer parts of the world, where materials are more precious and salvaged items are more highly valued. This may help to create material systems for construction that replicate and integrate with the cyclical features of nature.

But what would our cities look like if our buildings were to be built from locally available, renewable and salvaged resources? What sort of new urban vernacular may emerge if we focus on previously used materials and components that come from the local area and do not need large amounts of energy and other primary resources? How does value in old materials get transformed and reconceptualized into new value? How can we transfer heritage value in components and not just whole buildings? Will the process of designing and constructing buildings need to change if it is based on a harvest of local, salvaged materials? What infrastructure is required to make this happen?

Today there is increasing interest in exploring how buildings are made and un-made, and in finding new business models that make use of discarded materials, components, and buildings (Figure 1.1). The above questions are addressed in this book, which draws on the experience of practitioners and case study projects to explore the potential for a new type of architecture that places a high economic, social and ecological value on existing materials and treats the urban environment as a transient store of resources that should be redeployed once their initial use is complete. The book focuses on the experience of designers who have started to explore ways to close resource loops, attempting to create systems where less is wasted. Materials destined for landfill are put back to use, with positive effects on the economy, society and the environment. As architect Jeanne Gang put it, they have begun to explore an ‘architecture originated in the material itself rather than in a formal language or design concept’.²

Figure 1.1 The TAXI building in Denver, CO, was entirely modernized by tres birds workshop using reclaimed materials, including a thermal exterior wall system fabricated from 21 000 recycled PET plastic water bottles.

Box 1.1 Venice Architecture Biennale 2016

For the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena created two introductory rooms using over 90 tonnes of waste generated by the previous year's art biennale in Venice. Short lengths of previously used crumpled metal channelling were suspended vertically, creating a unique ceiling using waste. Also, the walls were covered by 10 000 m² (100 000 sq. ft.) of multicoloured leftover plasterboard (drywall) pieces which were stacked to create a moulded surface that included protruding display shelves.

1.1 Background

Architecture in its traditional role is probably a dying profession. Today, architects must work with systems; they must design new ways of living and working in which buildings play a key role. We desperately need mediators between human need and the enduring cycles of nature. Architects can, and must inhabit this new role.

(Paul Hawken³)

Architecture is created from a fusion of concept and matter, what Louis Kahn called ‘the measurable and the unmeasurable’, and throughout history architecture has been shaped by a dialogue between ideas and materials. Kieran and Timberlake in their book Refabricating Architecture state that ‘architecture requires control, deep control, not merely of the idea, but also of the stuff we use to give form to the idea’.⁴ Traditionally this has led to a fascination with the newest and most innovative materials, and the evolution in architectural history has a strong association with new technology. Today the vast majority of materials used to create the built environment are new and pristine, and our consumer culture leads us to assume that new is best. At the same time, most materials are unrelated to place, and predominantly come from all over the world – aluminium may come from South America, steel from Russia, glass from China, timber from Canada and so on.

Material and component selection is a vital part of architecture because it holds such potential to communicate meaning in our built environment. In the developed world today we do not normally conceive of buildings as being made from local, salvaged, pre-used materials. We are used to the off-the-shelf method of choosing materials (and technologies). But up until the twentieth century many building components were custom designed by architects. Windows, columns and so on were not standardized. More recently, architects have come to rely on a readily available architectural palette of standardized components from catalogues or web sites. Information such as specifications, dimensions, and standard details for globally produced building components are readily available and their use is facilitated by digital technologies. Design and construction for most buildings is organized as a process of integration of appropriate components. This has isolated designers from a better understanding of materials and their tectonic potential and has removed some creative possibilities and discovery from design.

Furthermore, the quantity of these materials that we use has grown hugely. In the last 50 years the world population has doubled yet our use of some engineering materials has grown by 4–15 times.⁵ This huge increase has enabled us to increase our living standards, creating and servicing a huge urban infrastructure connected by extensive transport networks. But, as architect Thomas Rau has pointed out, unlike energy, which is widely available from the sun (we just need to implement appropriate technologies for harvesting it), access to materials is effectively limited by what is available on earth, and for some materials we have consumed most of the easily obtainable supply.

In a world faced with climate change, increased resource scarcity, and other environmental, social and economic challenges, access to new material resources and disposal of waste are becoming far more costly and constrained. Growing concerns about the loss of useful resources and physical limits of the earth's capacity to provide new resources and absorb the mountains of waste accumulating in landfills, as well as the increasing cost of disposal, are leading some to a rethink how we deal with resources.⁶ The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has noted that ‘As global population continues to rise, and the demand for resources continues to grow, there is significant potential for conflicts over natural resources to intensify in the coming decades’.⁷

The work of photographers such as Edward Burtynsky, Timo Lieber and Vik Muniz (Figure 1.2) brings to light the vastness of the process of dealing with materials throughout their linear life cycle and highlight some of the impacts this has on individuals, society and the natural world. As buildings gradually become less carbon intensive for operating energy use, the impact of extracting, processing and installing the materials used to create the built environment become increasingly important and the embodied energy and carbon that occurs from this becomes progressively more of a concern.

Figure 1.2 ‘Atlas (Carlão)’ is one of several amazing portraits created by photographer Vik Muniz and the catadores – self-designated pickers of recyclable materials, using waste from Jardim Gramacho waste dump located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

It is now commonly recognized that a linear economy, which focuses on maximizing ‘throughput’, is wasteful because it permanently disposes of valuable resources after their first use. There is an increasing awareness of the need to move towards a circular economy, based on cyclical systems as observed in nature, which aims to transform the value of existing resources that have come to the end of their usefulness in their current form. Many governments around the world are beginning to consider resource efficiency, resource productivity and waste reduction, in addition to climate change and other development issues in their policies. In 1999, John Prescott MP (then UK Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions) stated that ‘In the past, focus has centred mainly on improving labour productivity. In the future, greater emphasis will be needed on resource efficiency. We need to break the link between continued economic growth and increasing use of resources and environmental impacts’.⁸ These factors will, in future, have significant repercussions for materials availability and, thus, architectural design and building construction. Supply of bulky, low value, construction materials may in future be far more dependent on local proximity and local availability. The need to design and build using local, readily available, renewable or reused resources, and to develop closed-loop systems for the life cycle of building materials are likely to become major drivers for the design of the future built environment. And this will create new design opportunities, but will also change the design and construction processes.

Some designers and building owners have begun to explore alternatives to the produce–use–dispose linear model of resource use in the built environment and to consider closed-loop approaches that aim to find use, value and inspiration in what was previously classified as waste (Figure 1.3). Materials destined for landfill can be put back to use, with positive effects on the economy, society and the environment. Such an approach has potential to alter the design and construction processes in ways that may lead to more place-based architectural solutions. It is also important to differentiate between reuse today, which has to deal with material that is already in use, and future reuse of materials that we can now ensure will be more readily reusable.

Figure 1.3 The Mountain Equipment Coop explored the potential for material reuse in several of its stores such as this one in Winnipeg, Canada.

Although green building rating systems such as LEED and BREEAM encourage a move towards closed-loop systems through strategies such as choosing recycled materials and reused components, at present in the developed world the reused building material sector is fragmented. There is an absence of a clear system or infrastructure with recognized business models and processes aimed at reuse. There is a need to establish a supply chain and inform designers about the potential of such materials and components, and to create a demand that will encourage demolition contractors to deconstruct old buildings due to the value they can get from them. Inventories are needed of salvaged products to enable designers and their clients to have confidence in the availability of materials. And certification processes for materials are needed to facilitate their use without concern.

At present, such factors are preventing the construction industry in most countries from embracing a more long-term view of the value and potential of existing materials and components, and this is hindering the establishment of mechanisms for their widespread reuse. However, in future, when choosing materials, it will be necessary to consider the social, ecological, and technical relationships and the networks that materials are part of.⁹ Identifying new business models that make such strategies profitable, and using appropriate design approaches that address consumer needs and create unique buildings, can overcome industry hesitance to embrace new material ecologies.

Successful case studies of reuse of components and materials in building projects discussed in this book are gradually becoming accepted in the mainstream. Although the designers featured are innovators and leaders in this field, they present a foretaste of a potential future that recognizes the value of existing resources, how they can be transformed and the resulting environment that can be created. They also offer some ideas about the infrastructure that will be necessary to establish reuse as a common feature of the built environment.

Box 1.2 Current Resource Use¹⁰

It is estimated that as much as 40% of the raw materials consumed in North America is for construction.

The European Union (EU) uses 8 566 million tonnes of material resources, of which 7 654 million tonnes (89%) are non-renewable.

From 1980 to 2010 worldwide metals and minerals use increased 66% from 19 bill tonnes to 31.5 billion tonnes (and is expected to grow to 53.7 billion tonnes by 2030).

Typically we still use materials on average only once.

People in rich countries consume up to 10 times more natural resources than those in the poorest countries. On average an inhabitant of North America consumes around 90 kilograms (kg) of resources each day. In Europe, consumption is around 45 kg per day, while in Africa people consume only around 10 kg per day.

Sixty percent of discarded materials is either put in a landfill or incinerated, while only 40% is recycled or reused, but usually for low value uses.

Ninety-five percent of the value of material and energy is typically lost at the end of the first use. Material recycling and waste-based energy recovery captures only 5% of the original raw material value.

1.2 Scarcity Of Resource

Scarcity appears to be a simple concept based on the notions of availability and shortage. However, it is a term that encompasses economic, political, social and ecological domains each with different associations to resource allocation and material use. Systems-theorists, such as Donella Meadows and others, suggest that scarcities occur when resource flows are in some way constrained or exhausted. Economic doctrine encourages us to dismiss such concerns, relying on the market to achieve optimal flows. In the 1970s, economist Georgescu-Roegen was the first to apply the thermodynamic law of entropy (which states that energy tends to be degraded to ever poorer qualities) to mineral resources, arguing that resources are irreversibly degraded and will eventually be exhausted when put to economic use.¹¹ His work inspired the field of ecological economics and the study of natural resource flows in economic modelling and analysis. He claimed that the economic process irreversibly transforms low entropy (valuable natural resources) into high entropy (valueless waste and pollution), thereby providing a flow of natural resources for people to live on but at the same time degrading the value of these resources.

Others argue that scarcity is a socially and economically constructed condition – there is enough food in the world, it is just in the wrong place. There is enough housing in the developed world, just in the wrong ownership. In the developed world of seeming abundance it is difficult to comprehend the relevance of the concept of resource scarcity. Thus, in reality, scarcity is extremely complex and mutable, and fundamental to the essential question of whether we can really have continual growth on a bounded and limited planet.

There is growing consensus that material availability in the future will be significantly constrained compared to the recent past. This may be due to physical exhaustion of supply of some materials (such as rare metals or platinum) but in many cases scarcity is linked to ease of availability, energy intensity of processing, cost of extraction and processing, and transport. There may be a lot of iron ore or aluminium ore in the earth but it may not be realistic to extract such large amounts of it in future. Conversely, as we have seen with the recent advent of fracking and tar sands oil extraction, sources become more or less economically and politically viable due to price changes for a particular resource and government policies and ideaologies.

Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence for all the major resources – energy, water, food and materials – that our existing global industrial models are leading to a series of persistent shortages and/or uncertainties. The Stockholm Resilience Centre has shown that using the concept of planetary boundaries, of the nine boundaries that the Centre has identified, by 2015 four have already been breached and several others are close to the threshold.¹² In 2007 the New Scientist magazine looked at the availability of many key minerals and calculated how many years these minerals would last based on various use scenarios.¹³ They speculated that material scarcity will call into doubt the aim that the planet might one day provide all its citizens with the sort of lifestyle now enjoyed in the west. Researchers at Yale University suggest that ‘virgin stocks of several metals appear inadequate to sustain the modern developed world quality of life for all of Earth’s people under contemporary technology'.¹⁴ The Worldwatch Institute has estimated that by the year 2030 the world will have run out of many raw building materials and we will be reliant on recycling and mining landfills.¹⁵ Increasingly, questions are being asked about whether we have the resources to deliver?

Consequently, consideration of building materials scarcity goes beyond simple availability and cost, to include engagement in the whole supply process from extraction, through processing, delivery, technologies used, skills required, assembly on site, use, maintenance and end-of-life disposal methods. It requires consideration of all the tangled social, economic, environmental and technical networks that are necessary to make a resource useful, and their consequent impacts. As Till and Schneider¹⁶ suggest, scarcity in an architectural context is much more than just an actual lack of material, space or energy. Rather, scarcity is revealed as socially, economically and politically constructed and requires a discussion of patterns of creation, consumption and behaviour.