Life changes
The benefits of reuse versus tearing down and building anew
BY PETER MITHAM
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undown buildings exist in every city, relicts of times past, reminders of what could be if only the properties hadn’t been so neglected. Some have character, others don’t. But for Peter Moonen, many have more value than most people think. Citing a study by the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute in Ottawa, Moonen says that a mere fraction of buildings – just three to four per cent – have structural issues that require demolition. “You’ve got 95-plus per cent of buildings that still have a use but they no longer serve the owners’ purposes,” explains Moonen, leader of the Canadian Wood Council’s Sustainable Building Coalition. “The building envelope and the foundations generally have full integrity and the building is perfectly usable.” The decision owners face is whether to renovate a building with an eye to accommodating new users; deconstruct it in order to salvage materials for reuse or recycling; or demolish and rebuild from scratch. Demolition may be the easiest way to obtain a blank slate for future development, but Moonen feels owners need to take a close look at alternatives that could extend the life of old buildings. “There are two strategies for building longevity – one is making the building so that it can be readily adaptable,” he says. “The other aspect is how can we recover the components. That is a tougher one to do.” Photos: (opposite page) Dominic Schaefer; (top) City of North Vancouver
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North Vancouver’s new city hall combines two buildings and reuses elements of both the pre-existing structures and the surrounding landscape Demolition
Demolition is the last option for Diane Switzer, executive director of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, but one she can’t avoid acknowledging. With half the buildings in Canada built before 1970, and demolition of the average 2,500-square-foot house generating approximately 60 tons of debris, Switzer says the renewal of Canada’s housing stock needs to take into account the load this will – literallly – place on the country’s landfills. “Demolishing to build new green buildings is not the best course of action. We need to make better use of what we’ve
already built. It’s simply not sustainable to demolish and build everything new.” Construction waste typically accounts for 27 per cent of materials entering landfills, but pilot programs in Vancouver over the past two years have demonstrated opportunities for making demolition more efficient. A project in 2011 funded by Metro Vancouver and overseen by Vancouver’s Light House Sustainable Building Centre saw 85 per cent of waste from one East Vancouver project diverted from landfill. A separate project commissioned by Vancouver city council saw just seven per cent of demolition debris sent to landfill.
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