A 21st century perspective – how sustainability changes the rules

 

 

Steve Tomlin’s article: due to be published in Demolition & Dismantling Magazine later this year.

Transforming demolition and reclamation

The Demolition and Reclamation industries are inseparably engaged in a debate that will transform our respective sectors beyond all recognition in the next twenty years.

The  irony may be that neither side is overtly aware that both stand on the threshold as the principal protagonists of the most important debate: how we become a sustainable society.

This is no vanity on our part and may sound incredible from the perspective of this moment in time.

Why are the Demolition and Reclamation industries so significant today?

It is highly unlikely that anyone in 1910 would have any truck with a description of how the late twentieth century would conclude. Similarly, it may be difficult to appreciate why the Demolition and Reclamation industries are such significant components of the sustainability debate.

Setting aside as temporary any of the recessionary issues that have affected the scale of the  economy in the last year, the future for the demolition industry from now will be dramatically different from its experience over the last thirty years.

The cost of exhausting our raw materials

The world’s resources of raw materials are being rapidly exhausted and increasingly commanded by market forces in the name of the Chinese and other fast-growing economies.

We simply cannot obtain sufficient virgin material to replace the materials we profligately send to landfill. The cost of replacement is reducing our competitiveness and, as a nation, we cannot fulfill our treaty obligations to reduce our carbon footprint if we continue to concentrate on Recyclates and Energy Recovery from waste.

Not for one minute do I believe that the quantum change required is so imminent that demolition will be transformed overnight, but if we do not redirect our approach to material recovery we will be like the WWI Generals who denied the possibility the horse could ever be replaced by armoured vehicles.

Even if it takes thirty or forty years, these changes will come about or our economy will be completely bankrupted. This does not even consider the environmental disaster and consequences that change could mitigate.

Let me take these thoughts out of the abstract and address, directly, the issues.

The issues of Recycling vs Reuse

When we recycle and make claims of 80% plus achieved targets, allowing politicians to boast ‘green credentials’ and the general public to feel reassured by such utterances, we display a complete failure to understand the truth.

If  you floor a steel frame building and save 99% of the volume of steel by sending the skipped materials to the local metal brokers, you recover only 7% of the embodied carbon. If you dismantle the steel for reuse then you recover 100% of the embodied carbon, less the costs of dismantling.

The politicians like the former process because they can tell the public they have achieved very high recovery levels which sounds good and wins votes from the gullible. In fact, it represents a deception justified by pragmatism and a belief that it is the only way forward. BUT, it doesn’t stop the problem of wasted embodied carbon.

We need to recover higher embodied carbon values

The industry needs a change of attitude and an altered perception and understanding of why we demolish and where we should be heading. Yes, we will continue to need bulk aggregate (recyclates) and inevitably some materials will  be designated  for incineration (energy from waste).  However, we need to segregate more materials and recover higher embodied carbon values from construction materials.

The old chestnut defence of most demolition contractors that many buildings are not recoverable begs the question, and points in the direction, of one vital change that must be given priority: we need to design out waste in our future architectural and planning practice and build for deconstruction and material recovery.

In the meantime, as we plan for change ahead, we need to ensure pre-demolition audits become accurate and sincerely attempt to identify materials available for higher recovery.

Who will pay for this?

Again I hear the cry “who will pay for this?” and ”how can we overcome time constraints defined by clients unsympathetic or ignorant of the need to change traditional practice?”.

The reality is to improve voluntarily or face inevitable financial penalties from the European Waste directives in the form of waste disposal increased charges and the removal of existing recovery note credits.

MASCo’s Sustainability investigations

Before others object that all this is fanciful, MASCo Sustainability has just completed exhaustive two year long trial investigations into major demolition projects. Results show that by planning, pre-demolition auditing, and buy-back supply line strategies, we have saved one of the largest UK retail chains massive savings by ending traditional demolition practice.

The combination of future elimination of waste by end-of-lifecycle designing, and the changes briefly described above, means demolition will become primarily deconstruction and material recovery in the next fifty years.

Coping with commercial volumes, skilling up, going forward

The greatest challenge for the reuse and reclamation side of this equation is the inadequate capacity and capitalisation to be able to cope with the commercial volumes. The National Federation of Demolition Contractors (NFDC) has been exemplorary in its encouragement of the deconstructors to skill up and obtain nationally recognised qualifications.

Central government will need to address these problems of capacity and skill or all ambition will fall at the first hurdle.

This should be a huge opportunity for the big demolition players to establish deconstruction teams, provide skills training, and direct capital to the creation of material stockholding centres.

The demolition industry more than any comparable trade has transformed itself faster and more comprehensively in the last thirty years; the challenge now is to go further and advance again.

Steve Tomlin is the owner and Managing Director of MASCo Architectural Salvage and Walcot Reclamation. National Chairman of the Reclamation Industry Trade Association (RITA UK); Stakeholder in material recovery projects with BRE and Bio Regional; Contributor to the Sustainability Agenda for the 2012 Olympics; Public speaker on all matters of Environmental Sustainability; Principal advisor on matters of future commercial sustainability to one of the UK’s largest retailers; Advocate of Demolition by deconstruction.

EcoBuild 2010: MASCo speaks on Sustainability

 

 

Steve Tomlin, MASCo MD, attended EcoBuild at Earl’s Court on 2nd March. Here is a blog version of his speech:

Sustainability, like the use of the word recycling, has come to mean all things to all people.

The danger of buzz words and their proliferation is that everybody comes to believe that prolific use and repetition are the same as meaningful change and real progress.

Sometimes it helps to reduce things to fundamentals. Our planet and its resources are becoming exhausted – and even if not yet imminent – it is useful to understand what our society in my lifetime has, effectively, been responsible for.

Look what we’ve done in 50mm of time

On a time line continuum  of some several hundred metres representing the length of time some form of life has existed on planet Earth:  The Roman Invasion, the Renaissance, Tudors, Stuarts, the Industrial Revolution, the advent of the car and the latest micro computers. We, identified as the  ‘written history of man’; our time line representation, would be  less than 50mm  of the overall length.

During that   ‘tiny’ window of   influence we have contaminated and exhausted our planet disproportionately by any measure. 

Now, driven by the need to address our excessive carbon footprint, we are  championing  sustainability as we did recycling to solve matters

Upcycling, not recycling

Recycling has for twenty years enabled a comfort zone of activity which changes nothing as we continue to crush and incinerate vulnerable materials that could be recovered or upcycled, thus making a significant improvement to our attempts to address embodied carbon values.

Let me just illustrate what I mean. if you crash to the ground a steel frame building and send the metals ‘recovered’ to the metal recyclers you will save 5-7% of the embodied carbon value. However, if you save and reuse the same RSJ’s, the embodied carbon recovered is above 95%.

Olympics 2012: the politics of sustainability

The relevance to my topic is that we should ensure that sustainability is not just more jargon like supplying “goods in green packets” to borrow associated benefit. Many of the problems are political and my work with Hyder Consultancy on the sustainability and pre-demo auditing is a good illustration of the problems.

To get the site developed and the Olympic Games actually built, ‘pragmatic’, you might argue ‘compromised’, decisions were made.

The Games at Stratford are, in the end, justified as designed for sustainability on the basis of Legacy; that afterwards the improved infrastructure and facilities will allow the East End to go forward and prosper. The jury is out and, to the ODA: we are watching and monitoring to ensure promises are fulfilled.

Sustainable design will build value

Again, I use the Olympics as an example – albeit a grand one – of designing with sustainability in mind. When talking to the planning authority and demolition industry, much material cannot be saved for reasons of time/cost and, more rationally, because the materials involved have little intrinsic value.

Confronted by the incredulous demolition contractor who honestly cannot see how you apply the ideas of reuse and reclamation to the average 1960/1970’s building, it is hard to mount a defence.

In this situation we have the very essence of both the problem and solution: we need to build with intrinsically valuable materials and stop creating architecture that is intended only to satisfy the need for a 15 year investment return lifecycle.

We need to forward-build durable architecture that considers end of lifecycle deconstruction and recovery

It is an indictment of our age that we are demolishing buildings constructed in my lifetime whilst we renovate and celebrate buildings constructed by the Georgians & Victorians that are still going strong.

We need to start introducing some caveats & qualify arguments. We need to understand what our political masters cannot grasp and why we have generally such appalling modern housing.

Local authority bureaucracy: no imagination, no creativity

We have charged legislators, who have struggled in the first place to comprehend the issues and delegated responsibility to local authority planning officials, with a challenge that is failing on all fronts. Instead of addressing imaginatively and creatively the problem, we regulate and administer a lowest common denominator approach swathed in bureaucracy and stifling mediocrity.

Local authority personnel recourse to a ‘by the  book approach’ for fear of punitive litigation and will not countenance risk, whilst conforming to long bankrupt ideas that are safe and predictable.

We need to break out of these structures.

Creating a fully sustainable supermarket across the UK

I know that some of you may be sceptical or feel a lack of realism. Let me address this possible criticism by saying that, for and on behalf of Britain’s leading retailer, I carry out sustainability policy development. The Chief Executive of that major chain has charged his colleagues with the creation of a fully sustainable supermarket within 20 years – across the board.

I say across the board for SUSTAINABILITY needs to address not just material recovery and architecture but an integrated system that applies to human resources and buildings alike, from procurement to deconstruction and reuse.

Commercial success through sustainability

That process is begun and is driven by, arguably, the most enlightened management team in the UK who have identified commercial success as interdependent with sustainability. Some of you may be familiar with Cheetham Manchester or more recently the new supermarket in Cambridgeshire; both represent first steps in a direction that is cutting edge design.

Every steel and timber element in these buildings is being bar coded with specification details, structural values and information that will allow end of life cycle recovery.

Local authorities: watch and learn…then act!

Of course, aesthetics and design can always be improved and it would be folly to boast the end result is a total and resolved solution, BUT it is happening and domestic housing and town planning need to catch up.

We need to insist that paramount consideration is given to how materials are deployed and how they can be modified in the lifecycle, as well as deconstructed at any end point. The more durable the buildings are, in terms of quality, the longer the lifecycle.

Construct, plan, develop sustainably

The salient and most important themes remain that we cannot continue to disregard the wanton waste of materials and we need to design sustainability into all elements of the construction, planning and development process.

There is no time for despondency; we must address these matters with both urgency and creativity.

Follow Steve Tomlin’s Sustainability Blog

English Heritage: a story of dubious ‘goings on’?

 

 

 

The Story so far

We blogged previously that English Heritage was reportedly instrumental in persuading Government Departments to repress planning legislation which required applicants to consider disposal and treatment of materials that might be affected by demolition at the time of new applications. This behind the scenes activity was recently commented upon in our blog at the time of the recent DEFRA consultation submission to Europe (Revisions to the Waste HierarchyPP115).

It seems, that what appeared at the time as the misguided action of  English Heritage, possibly for misplaced but sincere reasons, is only part of what, increasingly, looks like a broader policy of more serious intrigue.

English Heritage is arguably compromised

English Heritage has, according to Richard Girling in his Times Online article Fireworks over fireplaces, embarked for some time in  commercial activity that seems to compromise its independence and integrity. Arguably, this conflicts with public expectation of such an auspicious champion of conservation and heritage matters.

If Richard Girling is correct, English Heritage is very confused on matters relating to accurate historical architectural detail and not a little bit hypocritical, if not potentially fraudulent, in not declaring a vested interest when proffering advice on period fireplaces and chimneypieces.

Authenticity vs Commercial Advantage…you decide

How can English Heritage remain independent and free from external influence if it is advising on architectural matters of authenticity and at the same time recommending clients install reproduction fireplaces from a company with whom it enjoys commercial advantages?

This seems a straightforward conflict of interest without even considering the carbon footprint of importing manufactured reproduction chimneypieces from Turkey, Italy and China.

In 2010 , I think we need to re -examine the role of who, in English Heritage, is responsible for these disastrous policy decisions before the public loses all confidence in these former trusted champions of Britain’s precious heritage.

Read the full article by Richard Girling in Times Online: Fireworks over fireplaces.