CULS ARTICLES
Material Reuse At Scale:
Reducing Waste and Embodied Carbon, whilst Unlocking Value
I
am writing as the CEO of Material Index, a construction technology company that has a software for the cataloguing and sale of materials within existing buildings.
Morgan Lewis CEO, Material Index
The reuse of the majority of components and materials from buildings being retrofitted, converted or demolished, will be completely normal in 2050.
Currently construction is responsible for over half of the UK’s waste by volume. Often it’s the case, particularly with interiors, that materials are being stripped out and sent to waste because the buildings they are part of are undergoing change and not because the components themselves are in any way defective or out of date. In fact, almost everyone who has worked in property for a length of time will have seen expensive components, ranging from structural steel, to partitions, to lighting systems, that were recently installed at great cost, being disposed of as waste. However, we should expect this to change quickly over the next decade. Far more of those components will be reclaimed, exchanged, often through digital platforms, and ultimately reused. Currently, less than 2% of all materials that arise from deconstruction are saved for reuse. There is an existing supply chain for purchasing many components, from beams to lights to bricks, as well as many new businesses entering the market, and existing manufacturers bringing in remanufacturing schemes. Whilst there can be additional costs to the dismantling and logistics involved in reusing components, we have found for about 20% of components within an office or retail unit, the resale value plus the savings made from lower waste disposal costs, make reclamation and resale worthwhile. This is far higher than the current industry average. It should be expected that the reuse and shared economy revolution we have seen in other sectors of the economy, enabled by the growth of digital platforms and marketplaces, and driven by changing consumer and manufacturer behaviour, will come to the construction industry. Overall the secondary (second-hand) retail sector has been growing at 11x the rate of primary retail over the last five years in the UK and US. 68
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LAND SOCIETY 2023
There are many tailwinds that will accelerate this transition. As the grid and transport decarbonise, both the waste footprint and the embodied carbon of construction will become an increasingly important, and publicly-known, issue. Yet, many of the materials currently being wasted, are themselves potentially the source of low embodied Carbon materials. The case of bricks is illustrative and astonishing. Each year the UK purchases well over 2 billion bricks, and also demolishes just over 2 billion, of which it is estimated less than 60 million are reused. Far higher brick reuse rates are possible, even with cement mortar walls, and plenty of new technology that is now commonplace in Scandinavia, can help with brick disaggregation. Meanwhile, it is extremely technically challenging to make a new fired brick as low-carbon as a reclaimed brick. It is highly likely the UK will continue to favour brick as an attractive and in-keeping facade solution and therefore that low-carbon reclaimed bricks will be increasingly in demand. As a result of the need to decarbonise the economy the property industry should be prepared for the UK to follow Denmark, France and key US states in regulating embodied carbon in new builds and renovations. This was recommended in a recent parliamentary report: Building to net zero: costing carbon in construction Parliamentary. Within the UK, the GLA in London has been leading by requiring Whole Life Carbon Assessments, and Circular Economy statements for larger schemes. There are however, real estate specific challenges to enabling reuse at scale beginning with simply knowing what is in a building prior to deconstruction and being able to know in advance of deconstruction, which of those components are worth dismantling for resale. While new, larger buildings often have advanced digital models that can contain this information, it is estimated that 80% of the buildings that will be around in the UK in 2050, have already been built. Most existing buildings have surprisingly limited information on their constituent components. Incidentally this is one of the reasons why it is so expensive when a building product, whether it be asbestos, combustible insulation or RAAC, turns out to be defective. Material Index digitally catalogues the components within buildings, provide information on their reuse potential, and offers full traceability on those components after deconstruction. We tend to work on larger estates and only enable sales materials to accredited business buyers. Our services are offered on a consultancy basis to landlords, including pre-demolition audits, or our digital product on a subscription basis to contractors. Our clients include British Land, Sir Robert McAlpine, 3XN architects and General Demolition.