<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/by-deconstructing-buildings-with-care-materials-get-a-second-life/>
"When Tsah Yahav and his team began to deconstruct a former military hospital
on a three-hectare site near Grenoble, a city in the southeast of France, it
was far from a classic image of demolition.
They didn’t deploy bulldozers or excavators. There weren’t any wrecking balls
or controlled explosions.
Instead, the team of a dozen workers went about their labor using handheld
tools.
“It was very manual work,” says Yahav, who led the eight-month project that
began in February 2021. “It took a bit more time to deconstruct things
carefully.”
The site, known as Le Cadran Solaire (The Sundial), had been earmarked by
regional authorities for a unique experiment to pilot a new way of reusing
buildings and the valuable physical resources within them after their initial
intended use.
Their goal was to salvage as much material as possible from the site —
including radiators, stones, bricks, tiles, door frames and handles — that
would otherwise have been thrown away, usually buried or incinerated, and to
give it a second life.
“We shouldn’t see these things as waste, but as resources,” explains Yahav.
For some years, Grenoble had been considering different ways in which to make
its local construction industry more sustainable.
For one, there is a pressing need to find a better model: Raw material
extraction, manufacturing and construction account for up to 12 percent of
greenhouse gas emissions and over 35 percent of the total waste generated in
Europe. (The European Commission estimates that more efficient use of materials
could cut 80 percent of those emissions.)
But they were also legally obliged to: Under the French anti-waste law for a
circular economy (AGEC), which came into force in 2020 after years of
development, some 70 percent of most non-hazardous building waste had to be
collected for processing in France. The objective is gradually rising, too: In
2024, the target was 82 percent, and it will increase to 93 percent by 2027.
So Le Cadran Solaire, which is being transformed into a mixed-use site for
university premises, housing and more, was chosen by Grenoble authorities as an
opportunity to measure and compare the financial, temporal, environmental and
social impacts of “classic demolition” versus so-called “selective
deconstruction” with a view to reuse."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
