Most of us are already quite comfortable recycling our household waste. In Spain, for instance, millions of tonnes of packaging are processed every year, but did you know that buildings and their materials can also be recycled, or that an entire building could be completely dismantled and reassembled?
Formula 1, often a laboratory for innovation, offers us a real-world example of this in the form of the Red Bull team’s “pit box”, known as the F1Holzhaus – literally, “the wooden house”. It made its debut at the 2019 Spanish Grand Prix and has been the team’s “home” in Europe ever since. Before every Grand Prix, fourteen workers assemble its 1,221 square metres in just 32 hours, and then dismantle it in less than a day.
This building reflects a change in the conception of construction, which has to be increasingly committed to sustainable buildings that can be adapted, modified and reused.
2.2 billion tonnes of waste
The construction industry is one of the largest producers of waste, generating around 2.2 billion tonnes per year globally. In Europe, it produces about 450 million tonnes, 40% of the continent’s total waste.
More than 90% of construction waste comes from demolition, but waste is also generated on-site – mainly as leftover or broken materials – and during manufacturing. The latter goes largely unnoticed, but we can visualise it in one stark statistic: the wooden beams in a building are usually just 20% of the original wood taken from source. The remaining 80% is lost as production waste in the form of sawdust, scraps, discarded parts, and so on.
This reveals the limits of the linear model – production, use, disposal – that still predominates. To counter this, the circular economy presents an alternative: designing for disassembly. This replaces demolition with systematic disassembly, meaning components can be recovered and reused.
This paradigm shift – from a single-use mindset to one of “reduce, reuse, recycle” – is already common in other fields. It is now starting to take hold in construction through various global initiatives that seek to integrate these concepts into safer, more sustainable and more durable buildings. They show how this can be achieved through conscious design, based on concepts such as modularity and standardisation.
This is coupled with carefully designed reversible joints, which allow disassembly without damage, as well as existing digital tools such as “material passports”: digital documents that locate and quantify the products and materials in a building, which can greatly simplify their future reuse.
Upcycling construction waste
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