When alternative residential areas like Drop City (California, in the late 1960s) began producing their own food and using refuse from the production-consumption cycle as construction material for self-built shelters, they were putting into practice an alternative to the much-despised consumer society. Since then, the more radical forms of reuse have been tainted with a reputation for romantic idealism, lacking enough of a practical core to be considered a viable strategy for sustainability. Yet reuse remains the most obvious and perhaps only worthwhile method of combatting the waste of products and raw materials. The alternative – which is to halt or seriously reduce construction, thereby using fewer products and raw materials – is perhaps advisable in some cases but generally neither feasible nor necessary, if smart reuse is utilized.

The need for reuse is twofold: it prevents refuse heaps and unnecessary energy consumption. Thirty per cent of the refuse produced in the Netherlands derives from the construction industry. On the whole, this refuse material is not especially polluting; but we cannot endlessly store it in refuse heaps. For this reason, approximately ninety per cent of construction refuse is recycled. In practice, this means the refuse is sorted and shredded or pulverized. This material is then used as raw material for embankments or melted down or compressed into a new material. These methods ignore the unique qualities of the material that existed prior to the recycling process. The surplus value that is added to the basic raw materials during the production of the construction material is largely lost again in the recycling process. Energy is required to cut or pulverize in order to produce a material that has, at best the same, but in most cases fewer, valuable qualities than before. Moreover, many materials are simply unsuitable for such recycling because they are composites and therefore cannot – or only by using lots of energy – be broken down into separate raw materials.

A portion of this construction refuse is absorbed by the secondhand market, recycling stores and antiquarian dealers. The great benefit of using secondhand goods is that the high-grade characteristics of the composite products are preserved instead of being reduced to low-grade materials. Yet the use of secondhand materials is rare in the construction industry. Attempts are being made to prepare construction components for reuse as part of the IFD programme (industrial, flexible and demountable construction), but this programme has yet to produce tangible results. What exists at the moment must be seen as a continuation of a subculture that started in the 1960s and has lain dormant ever since. Over the years, however, this subculture has become professionalized. For instance, Auburn University (Alabama) set up the Rural Studio architecture programme which focuses on building projects that combine local building techniques and radical reuse.1 In constructing one of the university’s buildings, laminated car windshields, which are normally dismantled, ground-up and melted down into glass for low-grade products (usually bottles), were instead left intact and used to glaze a large conservatory. Car tyres filled with dirt have been used as wall material for an open-air chapel, and compressed bales of corrugated cardboard were used to make a highly sound- and heat-insulated wall in a home. Actually, the American Michael Reynolds has for some 30 years now been propagating the thermal mass benefits of using dirt-filled tyres for solid walls in his self-sufficient, self-build programme, Earthship. Today, Reynolds’ organization offers a comprehensive set of instruction manuals and videos and has a network of enthusiastic self-builders that extends across all seven continents.2

In the Netherlands, the architectural firm 2012 Architects (Jan Jongert, Denis Oudendijk and Césare Peeren) views reuse as an integrated design strategy, and, working under the name Recyclicity, is busy creating a network organization for more widespread and efficient reuse in the construction industry. However, ecological considerations were not their prime motivation. More important, in their view, is the creative inspiration they draw from the potentialities of recovered objects. The ‘history’ that is inherent in used products and materials – and which is absent in unused new materials – offers potential added-value when incorporated in new products and compositions: the ready-made principle of art applied to architecture. 2012 is, then, an example of a new kind of architectural practice, that of ‘process architecture’, in which the design is seen not as the start of a linear process that ends with the building’s handover, but rather as a phase in a continuous stream of creation and re-creation. The designers see themselves as organizing cogs in a complex, changing and self-building city, where feedback and reuse are take for granted and everything is a pre-phase or half-finished product of a new phase.

The firm’s name is derived from its first reuse project involving a large section of Gerard Scholtenstraat in Rotterdam, where a group of residents rejected demolition in favour of a self-managed reclamation project lasting until 2012. The necessary technical improvements and renovation work are being financed without mortgages and subsidies through a combination of DIY, smart reuse and a modest financial contribution from the residents. An important, ongoing project for 2012 Architects – and in some respects a permanent laboratory for reuse principles – is the agency’s own office in one of the buildings on the street. These firsthand experiences with reuse form the basis of Recyclicity. The underlying assumption of this project is that much ‘refuse’ in its original, unaltered state is usable, and that pulverizing it into a low-grade raw material leads to a loss of quality and unnecessary energy consumption. The use of clever design work, whereby the existing characteristics of the refuse are assimilated early in the design process, leads to innovative applications and unexpected designs. To arrive at an integrated ‘chain approach’, certain alterations need to be made to the traditional design and construction process. Demolition must become part of the construction process, being deployed at the start of the chain, and not solely at the end: the demolition and building contractor are combined. The design process must also be adapted. In the current design and construction process, construction materials and products are known to the architect beforehand and can be looked up in building supplies catalogues. This is not the case in a project based on maximum reuse, so it is necessary to get an idea of which refuse qualifies for reuse at an early stage. The design therefore begins with two simultaneous, inventorying activities. On the basis of the building programme, a rough spatial plan is made with a general overview of the materials required. These are not named as such, rather their quantities and performance requirements are listed. At the same time, the available refuse must be located and indexed according to its possible uses. In principle, there are no limits on the type and quantity of usable refuse.

Refuse need not originate exclusively from buildings. In addition to construction materials and half-finished products, mechanical and electrical systems, whole and partial buildings and residual urban spaces are all eligible for reuse. Indeed, recognition of the construction potential of waste products that do not originate in the construction industry constitutes an important new ‘design task’. It requires thorough research, creativity and an understanding of the performance capabilities required of building products to be able to see that a refrigerator’s sidewall can be used as insulating facade material or that porthole doors from washing machines make tightly closing windows. In listing the performance capabilities of waste materials, economic factors may also be taken into account. Many products already entail a ‘waste disposal fee’ paid at the time of purchase. Some products can therefore be purchased for ‘negative material costs’; they earn money. These disposal costs are expected to rise in the future, creating an extra economic stimulus for reuse. In fact, it may not be long before disposing of something is more expensive than repairing it.

In the next stage of the design process, the inventoried potentialities of the recovered refuse must be repeatedly weighed against the spatial, structural and physical performance requirements arising from the building programme. The form is thus the outcome of an optimal combination of the required function and the possible performance of the waste product in question. In principle, this assessment process begins with an inventory of the site, where the first task is to assess the potential of what is already there. This might lead to the conclusion – on spatial/functional, economic or cultural-historic grounds, or because of creative insight into unexpected potentialities – that it is not necessary to build at all and that adaptation of the existing structure will suffice. But if this is impossible or unfeasible, the next thing is to see whether refuse from the site itself and the immediate surroundings can be rendered usable. It is important to keep the distance between the reusable product and the actual construction site as short as possible, since transport accounts for a portion of the energy use in the recycling processes. In principle, a product’s reuse value should be correlated to its distance from the site; the further away the product is, the more high-grade it should be. The concept of ‘regional-specific construction’ is intensified by Recyclicity and in the process stripped of sentiment and nostalgia, in that it is not confined to the ‘reuse’ of local building traditions, but extends to all the available material and non-material, including junk, at or near the site.

‘Harvesting’ usable material and inventorying distances and usability are especially complex and labour-intensive tasks. Recyclicity therefore wants to set up a network organization for swapping knowhow and materials among the various parties in the refuse chain. The network consists of suppliers and buyers of refuse, demolition contractors and collectors, designers and inventors, builders and DIY hobbyists, and governmental and private contractors. As a means of establishing and maintaining communication between the parties, a web site will be set up, its most important component being a database – the HBD (Hergebruik Bouwdocumentatie/Recycling Construction Resource) – in which information about refuse and the possibilities for new applications will be collected and made accessible. A supply and demand module is another possibility. Recyclicity has made a modest start with an experimental project in the Leidsche Rijn housing development involving a group of dwellings and workspaces which will be built, as far as possible, from reused materials. They began by making an inventory of waste products in the immediate surroundings. The next step is the construction of a model home in which the principle can be demonstrated and tested.

1. www.ruralstudio.com
2. In the Netherlands, Stichting Owaze (Owaze Foundation) has set itself the goal of building an Earthship.
2012 Studio, Rotterdam
Literally everything in the office – from the floors to the computers – is reused. Like true ‘urban farmers’, the trio from 2012 Studio combed the city’s streets and neighbourhoods on the lookout for usable materials to harvest. The agrarian metaphor is apt in more ways than one: like a garden, the office will never be finished. Its design and construction will be a never-ending process of ‘gardening’ – demolishing, moving and adapting.
Because maintaining short transportation lines is a key Recyclicity principle, the first thing to be reused is the material from the building itself. The joist construction of the existing floor was put back in a higher position, thus creating more headroom in the basement below and allowing it to be put to better use. Steel beams originating from the dismantled, undulating wall of an Alvar Aalto exhibition at the NAi were used for the loadbearing structure of a mezzanine floor which thus assumed a similarly curved shape. The construction was augmented with steelwork originating from the seats of the demolished Excelsior soccer stadium. The meranti parquet floor was recovered from a dumpster in the street. The floor sections were joined together with a perspex spring – discarded window display material from a local H and M clothing store. Sawn partition walls from a bedroom furniture store were turned into a computer desk; the outer facade was insulated with 10cm-thick discarded roof insulation slabs from the Doelen theatre; the double glazing in the lower facade came from renovated buildings, and so on.
White Goods Home/ WasAutoMatiek/ Miele Space Station
The potential of refuse originating from the household appliance sector was tested in the project ‘Household Appliance Home’. In Rotterdam, 10,000 refrigerators are disposed of annually. Each refrigerator yields 2.5m² of insulating panels, from which, in combination with discarded train rails (support construction), countertops (facade cladding), washing machine doors (water-tight windows) and discarded fire-escapes, 22 homes could be produced annually. This concept was reused for the ‘WasAutoMatiek’ bar, constructed out of steel profiles and dismantled washing machines fronts. A complete oven with its back removed serves as an orders window and/or pizza-heating unit. The modular dimensions of standard appliances (always 60cm) make reuse especially easy. The bar itself will in turn be rebuilt as the ‘Miele Space Station’, an on-site information centre and office from which the firm will work for two months on the Recyclicity project in Leidsche Rijn.