From Grave to Cradle: Reincarnation of Building Materials

One of the main problems of sustainable building is that the existing systems don't lead to clean and direct reusable secondary building materials after demolition. In constructions in the Netherlands many different building materials are being used. When a building has reached its end of life, it will be demolished and it becomes demolition waste. Because a lot of different building materials will be mixed together during the demolition process, much effort must be taken before the demolition and construction waste can be reused. To solve this problem, two steps need to be taken. Firstly, a building should be designed for recycling. Secondly, all buildings should be dismantled into elements or reduced to clean secondary materials. The approach here is twofold. Firstly, research into the demolition/dismantling-process is conducted in order to find the bottlenecks in closing of the material cycle (at either element or material level). Secondly, as a spin-off of solving these problems, recommendations are made for future building-systems: design for recycling. This paper describes how certain demolition and dismantling techniques can be used in achieving the goals of sustainable design and construction.