Four examples of reuse of construction materials
1.
Reclaim Detroit creates local jobs while solving the blight problem.
Reclaim Detroit is a social enterprise founded in 2010 to fight blight, create jobs for Detroiters, and reclaim valuable resources from the landfill using deconstruction and innovative reuse practices. Our crews carefully dismantle parts of buildings that would otherwise be destroyed by demolition, saving everything from antique doors to old growth lumber, while also gaining valuable work experience in the green construction and demolition industry.
Beyond our core efforts to train and employ workers facing barriers to employment, Reclaim Detroit has successfully advocated for city-wide policies that support the sustainable removal of structures with an eye towards reuse and local economic development. Largely as a result of these efforts along with support from many partners and foundations, Reclaim Detroit will soon enter a public private partnership with Detroit to manage and operate a Reuse Hub in midtown.
Every house matters. Every job matters. Reclaim Detroit.
2.
At Superuse Studios
we believe we can make a difference… We think ingenious, beautiful and functional architectural and social design solutions can be created using existing resources, materials and systems. Everything is already there, we just have to see and utilise it. In this way we can transform to a sustainable society and limit the impact of architecture and design. To make optimal use of locally sourced ‘waste’ in new design solutions is what we call SUPERUSE. Functionality, sustainability and aesthetics are our guiding principles.
3.
Rotor Deconstruction facilitates the reuse of construction materials.
Rotor Deconstruction is a young actor in the business of salvaged building components. We are currently the only such company in the Brussels Region. The elements we put on sale were dismantled from buildings in Belgium (occasionally France and the Netherlands) slated for demolition.
By buying our salvaged goods you help reduce the quantity of demolition waste produced, and buy yourself quality building materials with a negligible environmental impact. Furthermore, several of the pieces we salvaged were conceived by renowned designers, realized by skilled craftsmen or with technologies now out of reach. Diverting these elements from the waste stream is a form of preservation, complementary to the efforts conducted by the established actors in historical building preservation.
Our team is skilled in dismantling on the building site, conditioning, transporting, cleaning and preparing for sale, a large variety of materials. We collaborate with building and demolition contractors, architects, municipalities and property management companies.
We actively look for quality buildings scheduled for renovation or demolition and set up partnerships with the owners and demolition companies. Our aim is to maximize the extraction of reusable elements from these buildings in the safest possible way. We always try to find interested buyers before dismantling, to save on transport and storage costs, and minimize risks of overstock.
4.
Orizzontale: do it yourself architecture for common spaces
Orizzontale is an architecture collective based in Roma whose primary interest are reactivation processes involving urban scrap. Intercepting places, ideas and things rejected from metropolitan (re)productive cycle, Orizzontale activates collaborative “public acts” in the form of semi-permanent architecture or installations, in which material and immaterial wastes mutually restore each other’s meaning.
Orizzontale since 2010 has been promoting do-it-yourself projects of common relational spaces, giving form to both dismissed and unseen images of the city. These projects have represented the ground for experimenting new kinds of interactions between city dwellers and urban commons as well as occasions to test the boundaries of architectural creation process.
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