Recovering building elements for reuse (or not) – Ethnographic insights into selective demolition practices
Introduction
Growing socio-environmental pressures to close its material loops stimulate the construction industry to consider reuse. Construction and demolition activities generate worldwide one of the heaviest and most voluminous waste streams, of which the majority ends up in landfills (Llatas, 2011). The industry is also responsible for more than half of the total global natural resources consumed annually and for more than a third of the total global energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions (Iacovidou and Purnell, 2016, Ness et al., 2015). These practices have severe impacts on the environment, including natural resources depletion, global warming, risks to public health, biodiversity loss and pollution of air, surface water and underground water (Cooper and Gutowski, 2015, Mahpour, 2018). Acknowledging the importance and urgency of these problems, societal emphasis on ‘circular’ models of production is growing, particularly in Europe and China (Jin et al., 2017, McDowall et al., 2017). Policy-makers accordingly strive to incentivize reuse because of the intuitive belief that it reduces both new production and waste (Silva et al., 2017). A scientific knowledge base then helps to develop effective strategies for closing material loops.
For reuse to occur, it is essential that demolition contractors shift their attention from destructing building parts to recovering them. The life-cycle expectation of a building generally does not exceed 50–60 years, after which the property owner must make a decision about its future (Laefer and Manke, 2008). When adaptive reuse of the building through renovation or upgrading (see e.g. Conejos et al., 2016, Remøy and van der Voordt, 2014) is not feasible, the owner can select a demolition contractor to demolish the building. That firm adopts any of three demolition methods: conventional demolition, in which the building is converted into waste; complete selective demolition (also called deconstruction), in which construction steps are reversed so as to recover as many materials as possible; or partial selective demolition, which is a combination of the other two (Kourmpanis et al., 2008). These methods differ in the number of elements that is recovered, i.e. the amount of material that is diverted from landfills or incinerators to replace natural resources in material flows (Kibert, 2016). While previous studies have revealed some generic challenges for reuse like regulatory barriers, economic constraints and a lack of public acceptance (Kibert et al., 2001), they are deficient in explaining when demolition contractors opt for recovery and when not. To further reuse practices, this lack of in-depth knowledge about demolition contractors’ recovery decisions must be addressed.
This research hence seeks to understand the conditions which lead to the recovery of a building element for reuse. It does not quantify the environmental or economic impacts of different deconstruction strategies, nor does it classify self-reported barriers or enablers for recovery; instead, our qualitative work conceptualizes recovery decisions (in terms of conditions) primarily based on participant observations during an actual demolition project. It starts from the premise that a demolition contractor needs to decide for each and every element in a building whether to recover that element or not. We define an element here as any physical part of a building that can be handled separately. Elements can be found in all “layers” (Brand, 1994, p.13) of a building: a lamp, ceiling tile, wiring, façade and column are all examples of elements. A building, in this view, constitutes (only) of elements that are all somehow connected to each other. In demolishing a building, a demolition contractor then faces two options for each element: recovery or destruction. Selecting the first option implies that the firm disassembles an element with the aim to offer it for future reuse; the second option implies that it treats the element as waste. When an element is destructed, the resulting waste may or may not be recycled: that is typically determined by a waste processing firm rather than demolition contractor (hence irrelevant here). Taking a qualitative approach, we develop a general proposition for predicting whether a demolition contractor recovers an element or not.
This paper is structured as follows. We start with a literature review on building element recovery and reuse in a circular economy. In the subsequent research design section, we present how we attempted to acquire detailed insights into actual demolition practices through unique participant observations and analytic induction. We then turn to presenting the results of that work: a proposition strongly grounded in the data about the demolition contractor’s (binary) decision to recover or destruct any building element. The paper ends with deriving suggestions for strategies that target element recovery.
Section snippets
Literature review – building element recovery and reuse in a circular economy
A literature review on reuse predictability suggests three knowledge gaps, here sorted from the abstract to the concrete. First, circular economy research tends to overlook the potentials to close material loops through reusing building elements. Second, building research concerned with reuse insufficiently considers recovery issues. Third, research dealing with element recovery has neglected the demolition contractor’s point of view.
Research design
This research seeks to understand the conditions which lead to the recovery of a building element for reuse. One partial selective demolition project was chosen to obtain ethnographic insights because of its revelatory nature (Yin, 2009, p.48): (i) recovery and reuse of building elements is still uncommon and (ii) those practices are also typically inaccessible to study due to health and safety (entry) regulations for site-based research. We got the rare opportunity to not only closely observe
Results – conditions for element recovery
Before any building element can be reused, it first needs to be recovered. Here, we attempt to arrive at a general statement of the necessary conditions which have always been present when a demolition contractor recovers a building element for reuse. Only when all conditions outlined below are met will a building element be recovered for reuse rather than be destructed (Table 1).
Discussion
This research revealed three conditions which together lead to the recovery of a building element for reuse. We embraced the rare opportunity to conduct (ethnographic) participant observations for the entire duration of a partial selective demolition project. This allowed us to examine the responsible demolition contractor’s recovery decisions for many building elements in all layers of the focal nursing home. The participant observations, together with complementary interviews and project
Conclusion
This study has used a fieldwork-based approach to develop a proposition for cleaner demolition processes: a building element will be recovered for reuse only when the demolition contractor: (1) identifies an economic demand for the element; (2) distinguishes appropriate routines to disassemble it; and (3) can control the performance until integration in a new building. This general proposition links together three conditions in a “classic formal statement” of expected relationship (Miles and
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Marc van den Berg: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - original draft. Hans Voordijk: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Arjen Adriaanse: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Supervision.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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2022, Sustainable Cities and SocietyCitation Excerpt :The main strategy to close material loops for buildings at the end of their useful life is that involving reuse. For buildings, this implies that refitting and refurbishment are prioritised over demolition and a total rebuild (van den Berg et al., 2020). The European Commission (European Commission, 2018) focuses its current strategies and policies on the circular economy through the Circular Economy Action Plan.