As part of CIRCuit, Clear Village organised the Urban Mined Hackathon. A novel response to COVID restrictions, instead of hosting an event with 30 people in a room, we programmed an extended 3 month hack with three designers from Good Waste, Other Today and Batch Space. The elongated timeframe has meant that the designers have been able to explore at depth the possibilities of the challenge.
In researching the challenge, the team talked with experts and visited recycling facilities in London. The demolition waste landscape is heavily regulated and for some materials highly profitable. This project is not really about avoiding landfill as few materials go down that route. Instead the team is interested in looking at the areas in the system that are problematic or where materials are downcycled further than they need to be.
Insights drawn from interviews focussed the project on harvesting materials normally rejected from the demolition recycling process for being contaminated, deleterious or illegal. Experts suggested we look at cladding panels (the kind used in Grenfell tower), crushed glass aggregate and plaster board. The team decided to look more into glass and plaster for their potential for perpetual reuse.
The gypsum in plasterboard is infinitely recyclable; it can be reset to its mouldable state simply by drying it out or ‘decalcifying’. All plasterboard should be closed-loop however many recycling facilities prefer construction waste (boards unused/ broken in the building process) to demolition waste to avoid the problem of contaminants such as paint, paper and screws.
Good quality glass is easy to recycle however a large portion from demolition gets mixed in with other materials like brick, ceramic and general waste. This aggregate finds its way back into construction projects as a filler for concrete or roads but this locks glass away as a rock replacement – glass however has sculptural properties, like it’s fusibility that make it worth manipulating rather than burying.
The glass recycler URM and the gypsum processor Roy Hatfield sent the team samples of their worst quality product and the team experimented with these low grade materials by crushing, drying and melting them, first in a domestic microwave and later using a hobby kiln. By working at this craft scale the team has innovated circular ways that make it possible to sculpt and resculpt the materials into architectural forms that celebrate their flaws.
Circular Construction in Regenerative Cities (CIRCuIT) project, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme