‘Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!’
In the UK, the construction industry accounts for 60% of all materials used, while creating a third of all waste and generating 45% of all CO2 emissions in the process. It is a greedy, profligate and polluting monster, gobbling up resources and spitting out the remains in intractable lumps. On our current course, we are set to triple material extraction in 30 years, and triple waste production by 2100. If we stand any chance of averting climate catastrophe, we must start with buildings – and stop conceiving them in the same way we have for centuries.
"We have to think of buildings as material depots. Waste is simply material without an identity. If we track the provenance and performance of every element of a building, giving it an identity, we can eliminate waste."
[Copenhagen architect Lendager Group] thinks it has some of the answers. It has just completed a housing development, called Resource Rows, that Lendager says represents a 50-60% reduction in CO2 compared to conventional construction, simply by reusing materials. They saw an opportunity in the demolition of Copenhagen’s vast Carlsberg brewery, whose bricks wouldn’t usually have been reused because modern cement mortar makes it very difficult to separate them. Instead, they took an angle grinder to the walls and sliced them up in one metre square chunks, stacking the panels to form a striking patchwork facade for the new apartment block. Windows, meanwhile, have been reused to make greenhouse roofs for shared allotments. The green credentials have proved popular: the homes were rented out more quickly than any other housing scheme in the city.
