![]() ![]() ![]() Dutch firm Maurer United Architects has responded to this challenge by building 125 new social housing units using over 90% of recycled materials from old adjacent blocks of flats on the Superlocal Estate in the Dutch town of Kerkrade. However, those seeking to mine the Anthropocene have to work largely with existing buildings that were not designed for de- or re-construction. This used buildings designed to be refashioned afterwards into sustainable homes for locals, thanks to things like full-storey partition walls that could be moved easily into new configurations. The 2012 Olympics showed these ideas in action through the construction of temporary accommodation for 17,000 athletes in London. The idea of designing buildings specifically with re-use in mind has acquired the tag "design for deconstruction". Crucially, he is also using these materials in a way that facilitates any later deconstruction – such as joining elements with bolts rather than glue – to create what he calls "a material store for the future". "We need to become ‘urban miners’ and re-work re-use previously made buildings, components, and material sources, " he wrote in a rallying call to action published in the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal in 2019.īaker-Brown is currently completing a pavilion for the world-famous Glyndebourne Opera in Sussex, the UK, built from waste products including oyster shells, champagne corks and "reject" underfired brick from a nearby brickworks. While these ideas would be included under the "circular economy" banner, Baker-Brown uses a more striking phrase: he calls for the need to "mine the Anthropocene" rather than dig up new material. He offers a simple but powerful redefinition of waste as being "just useful things in the wrong place". He has laid out a blueprint for a new way of minimal waste construction in his 2017 book The Re-Use Atlas, and teaches its principles to a rising generation of architects and builders at the University of Brighton’s architecture school. "The waste house is a 'live' research project that gets people thinking where materials come from and where they end up," says Baker-Brown. Around 10 tonnes of chalky soil destined for landfill was diverted to create rammed earth walls, while used carpet tiles rescued from an office provided exterior cladding. Baker-Brown combined various different materials from used denim to plastic DVD cases and discarded toothbrushes to make the wall cavity insulation, and old bicycle inner tubes to provide sound and impact floor insulation. Then in 2013, UK architect Duncan Baker-Brown outdid Superuse by using over 90% waste materials to build the Brighton Waste House. ![]() Steel from old textile machinery and timber from damaged industrial cable reels are among the total 60% of second hand materials used. In 2005, Rotterdam-based architecture firm Superuse laid down a marker for a new vision of construction by completing Villa Welpeloo, the world's first contemporary house to be made with a majority of waste construction materials. This all gives rise to an obvious question – why don't we re-use what we've already extracted, rather than gouging the planet for ever more raw materials? This thought has spurred a growing band of architects and building firms to look at how to re-use the huge range of materials already hiding within our built environment, from concrete and wood to the metallic bounty within electronic waste. The vast quantities of copper inside billions of cables worldwide is a far more concentrated source of reusable metal than the less than 1% in top-grade ore. It's been calculated that one tonne of mobile phones contains 300 times more gold than a tonne of the best quality gold ore, as well as significant quantities of silver, platinum, palladium and rare earths – all things we scar the earth to get more of by ongoing mining. Future archaeologists will dig through strata of manufactured detritus to discern how we lived.īut this stuff that we make and discard today also contains a treasure trove of materials we could be using to our benefit. The "waste" from the consumption of these raw materials is dumped in such vast quantities that its environmental imprint has helped to create a new epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene. Compare that to the 2-3% caused by aviation, which people fret far more about. Construction creates an estimated third of the world's overall waste, and at least 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Roughly half of the raw materials we extract go into the world’s built environment. That’s equivalent to destroying two-thirds of the mass of Mount Everest every 12 months. We now smash, grab and pull some 100 billion tonnes of raw material out of the fabric of the planet in just a single year. ![]()
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