Reuse: Again and Again
Have you ever thought about the sink you use every day? This sink was salvaged from a house demolished just moments after. The sink has a history, a life of its own, and now has the chance to live on. Reusing construction materials is part of the circular economy and needs to be implemented in every construction project. ETH Zurich develops and tests methods to scan buildings and their treasures - to find urban mines and make the materials accessible and available.
We seldom take a second look at the everyday construction elements that we encounter every day, such as sinks, windows, door handles, or stairs. We use them, and common sense is to demolish the whole building as soon as it has been used for about 30 years, and something new has to be built. However, if we account for the high quality of materials that are installed in buildings in Switzerland, it is mind-blowing to think how common it is just to demolish and discard them. If we’d take a second to think about the amount of resources, the embodied grey energy, and the fantastic quality of these materials, we realise how many opportunities we are missing! As Kushal Matai stated: “Waste will keep on creating problems until it’s not seen as waste but resource”.
The "Swiss building stock" consists of approx. 3200 million tonnes of building material, with material growth amounting to approx. 63 million tonnes per year. 80-90 million tonnes of waste are produced annually in Switzerland, 84% of which is generated by the construction sector (FOEN 2021).
To fight these overwhelming facts, a few companies in Switzerland have started to work against the demolition of building materials. Together with ETH Zurich, methods are being developed and tested to scan buildings, and their treasures, to find out where the urban mines are and make the materials available and accessible.
Sumami (sustainable material mining), for example, is a start-up that understands cities as the raw material depots of tomorrow. They offer services around the reuse of building components and materials. Strategic consulting is as much a part of their offer as project development, architectural support and building inventories and assessment, always with the aim of introducing circular economic aspects into building projects, companies, and even entire industries.
As a tool for this, they are developing useagain - the Swiss brokerage and sales platform for the reuse of building components in the construction and real estate industry.
The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!
(Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
