Duncan Baker Brown on Reuse Before Recycle

If we all took a moment to consider how to reuse materials rather than recycle we would be one step closer to repairing our planet by adopting a reuse economy.

These are the sentiments of Duncan Baker Brown, a practicing architect, academic, environmental activist and author of ‘The Re-Use Atlas: a designer’s guide towards a circular economy’.

What does the architecture of reuse look like?
I address this in my recently released book: The Pedagogies of Re-Use The International School of Re-Construction, in which we look at an EU-funded 5 million euro research project, which focused on the capacity for the construction sector to deconstruct buildings instead of demolish them. And to crucially reuse those deconstructed elements in new construction projects.

The aim is to turn off those taps of raw materials being mined and harvested every year, and just reuse the stuff that’s been mined and harvested before.

However this isn’t a simply task, because there are so many vested interests along that supply chain of people needing to make their living out of the mining and processing new raw materials. To have a true circular economy we need to design out waste and stop throwing things away that are perfectly reusable, whether that’s demolishing buildings or throwing away.

Plus, what I find exciting about looking at these different ways is there’s job opportunities all the way through. So it’s about doing things differently, or at least adopting a different approach to waster and reuse.

How do we move forward and achieve such a circular economy?
We need to teach these thing. We need our academics and our students to be well versed in these techniques. And to ask really basic questions, like, what does the architecture of reuse look like? What’s the aesthetics of reuse?

Some years ago I wrote The Re-use Altas and I have revised this this year and released a second edition: The Re-use Atlas – A Designer’s Guide Towards a Circular Economy. I took 40 case studies and used these to provide an accessible and practical guide to how architects can move from a linear economy towards a circular economy.

One particular case study was on a 20 year old building in the city of London – and these are just the sort of buildings that are typically get stripped out every three or four years, when their interiors get stripped out, thrown away, and then are ultimately demolished and start again, Now we know that they don’t need to be stripped out that often or demolished, but industry demands such actions to maintain modernity!

Now what is interesting is that on this particular building, British Land and Lend Lease together decided that they would look at how they could reuse what was there and adapt what was there. There was a lot of concrete and they decided to recycle this. A nine storey curtain wall system was deconstructed, sent to a car park in Watford, cleaned up, upgraded and reassembled on site. The reason they could do that is because they engaged with the original suppliers. So for me, that’s the Holy Grail. Collaboration and circular thinking.

Where does your passion come from and your activism around climate change?
It has always inside me. I was born in West Essex, near Epping Forest. We lived on a farm and when I was about eight years old I was walking with my Mother and a couple of our dogs through what I call “the rabbit meadow”, a lovely flower and wildlife filled meadow. This day we walked beyond the meadow and up a hill towards what I thought was woodland. When we reached the top I said to my Mother what’s that? And she said, that’s the Natwest Tower. I thought I was walking through a wilderness but we were actually on the edge of London. She told me then that one day she feared that the only places where nature would be accessible, would be in nature reserves.

As I grew up I say London expand, I particularly remember watching the M25 being built. From then on I could see the tension between human development and the natural world.

What comes next, what are your ambitions for moving forward?
I think we are in rapidly changing times now, and I think things are changing for the good, for the better.  And I’m hoping that in the UK, with a new government things will continue to improve, creating an environment that’s more inclined towards reuse.

If we created the right economic environment to subsidise and nurture a reuse economy which for a lot of people means a retrofit economy, that could be a huge step. You know, all our built environment needs to be retrofitted – from a point of view of energy, consumption and overheating climate resilience.

But we might need more awareness to make sure that standards come in. I think we need the legislation now to support the ambition.

What we need is our industry to get together and go directly to the relevant minister and say give us the legislation that says you need to understand the whole life carbon footprint of your development. So that embodied carbon, operational carbon life cycle and assessment has to be done correctly.

We benchmark it, and if you want to do any sort of development, you’ve got to meet these targets, and as soon as you’re in the world of whole life carbon, you immediately don’t want to throw away the thing you’ve already got, because that gives you a big carbon whole which you don’t want.