Recycling an old US military base

DW (English)

Construction consumes an incredible amount of resources and causes lots of emissions. But mountains of building materials lie on our doorsteps: in old buildings. Can old materials be reused to make new buildings more environmentally friendly?

Transcript

00:00Built in the 1950s as part of the U.S. military's significant Cold War presence in West Germany,

00:06Patrick Henry Village was an American island on the outskirts of Heidelberg.

00:11Like many U.S. Army bases, it was basically its own little city, with housing for thousands

00:16of soldiers and their families, schools, a church, a bowling alley, and most importantly,

00:21it even had American fast food chains you couldn't find in the rest of Germany.

00:26But after U.S. troops relocated to nearby Wiesbaden in 2012, Patrick Henry Village became

00:31a ghost town, leaving behind thousands of American appliances, and even outlets.

00:38Since then, the area has only been used in part to temporarily house refugees.

00:45The city has grand plans to redevelop the village into a shiny new district with housing

00:49for thousands, offices, and green spaces.

00:53That would typically mean mass demolishing and getting rid of these old houses, and putting

00:57up entirely new ones.

01:00But old buildings are only a problem if we see them as such.

01:03We have an urban mining concept based on the idea of a circular city, where we treat everything

01:10left behind here as though it's a mine.

01:17Jürgen Otschuk is Heidelberg's deputy mayor and heads up its city planning department.

01:22There really are lots of resources here, and we want to value these materials and use them

01:27to build a new district.

01:30Roughly one-third of the buildings will be left standing, gutted, and renovated.

01:35The rest will be taken down to make space for a denser neighborhood with mixed-use buildings,

01:40not just housing.

01:41But the special thing about this project is that instead of sending the deconstructed

01:46buildings to landfill, the goal is to resell, reuse, or recycle everything that you can

01:51see here, from literally the ground up.

01:56While windows like these could typically be reused, the changing energy standards since

02:00these were put in means that they can't be.

02:03They can though be recycled, a tricky process, but it's possible.

02:07Concrete can either be reused or recycled as well.

02:11But then, we've got to find a home for all these big old American fridges in Germany.

02:15While those will be a tough sell, all of this represents a new approach to old buildings

02:20and goods.

02:23Improving how we build things is vital.

02:25Construction accounts for 13% of global energy-related carbon emissions.

02:30And it's not just about putting up buildings.

02:32When buildings are demolished, they usually end up in landfill.

02:36All told, construction and demolition account for about one-third of all waste in Europe.

02:43Projects like the one in Heidelberg can do their part to change this.

02:46But it didn't actually start here.

02:48It started in an office in Stuttgart, about 100 kilometers south.

02:53The first step is actually to get an idea of what you have.

02:57Matthias Heinrich works for EPA, an environmental consulting company that's partnered with

03:02Heidelberg to build a database of the city's building stock, starting with Patrick Henry

03:06Village.

03:07So you need to know exactly how much material you have, what is the properties of the material,

03:11are there hazardous substances, for instance.

03:14EPA can estimate a building's construction materials based on its age and location.

03:19And its database helps cities like Heidelberg get a sense of reusable and recyclable materials

03:24at their disposal when planning new projects.

03:28Heidelberg then confirms the estimates.

03:33That means boring holes in the floors, walls and ceilings, and making a checklist of everything

03:38left hanging around the former base.

03:41It shows you that over 52% of the building is actually concrete, and around 5% is metal.

03:49And this is like a first overview of the inventory.

03:55This information is tracked for the whole neighborhood, with a breakdown of all 500,000

04:00tons of material.

04:01Look, I know this seems a bit dry, but without any of this documentation and all of these

04:06databases, none of the actual mining of urban mining is remotely possible.

04:11While urban mining, sometimes called circular construction, is a new term and has begun

04:15to take off in the last 5 to 10 years, it's not a new principle.

04:19Up until the industrial revolution, actually, urban mining was very common.

04:24Nico Schouten focuses on the built environment at Dutch sustainability consultancy Metabolic.

04:29During the industrial revolution, and I think that's what we see with a lot of production

04:32processes, production became cheaper, mass consumption became more common, and we kind

04:39of let go of reusing what we already have.

04:42Metabolic's urban mining efforts include partnering with cities, architects, and construction

04:47companies.

04:48I think a very interesting case that we've worked on is the building of the Dutch National

04:52Bank.

04:53The 14-story skyscraper was entirely disassembled.

04:56Metabolic are working with the developer to design a new building from the secondary materials.

05:01They've also built an office park out of old houseboats.

05:06In the Global South, for example, there just aren't as many empty houses, offices, and

05:10shops as in the Global North.

05:12But in a way, urban mining is pretty big here, even though people don't necessarily call

05:17it that.

05:18When you think of informal settlements, for instance, they are very circular in that the

05:23materials that have been used in these informal settlements have had several lives before

05:29they end up in these informal areas.

05:32In Heidelberg, this process is a lot more bureaucratic.

05:36Painstakingly documenting every tile in an entire mini-city by color may seem a little

05:43bit crazy, but you never know when it might help.

05:46And that's not even the hard part.

05:48It's now that the real fun begins.

05:50Things that can be directly reused will need to be sold.

05:53We've got 2,000 complete kitchens and they don't all have a built-in habit.

05:59We've got sockets and toilet bowls and sinks and faucets.

06:02The buildings themselves will have to be picked apart, and then you need to figure

06:09out what to do with the materials.

06:12Take the 90,000 tons of brick at Patrick Henry Village.

06:15Most of that will be able to be reused to some degree.

06:18But for the 230,000 tons of concrete, it's a different story.

06:23We'll definitely have to process the concrete.

06:26It'll be broken down and then parted by new concrete.

06:31Some of it will be used as the base for streets.

06:33Those are some of the different utilizations we've developed, and we had to do that for

06:38every single material, and that's a lot.

06:43Even if we start cataloging and mining our buildings on a grand scale, we'll never be

06:48able to entirely eliminate the use of new building materials.

06:52It's not just about how we deconstruct what's already here.

06:55It's also about rethinking how we build.

06:59Usually in a building, you design a building, and then you find materials that fit.

07:02But if you have to design with a set of materials, then you really have to shift your way of

07:07thinking and really have also a different position as an architect in this whole process

07:12and be more of an assembler of materials instead of a designer of a building.

07:17We'll need to use different materials if we want to make future urban mining easier.

07:23With that in mind, EPA builds with materials that are primed for easy reuse.

07:27Hence all of the untreated wood furniture in their office.

07:32They've also designed a circularity passport for new buildings that logs materials for

07:37future reference, and tracking this data could soon be a requirement in Germany.

07:42Despite the different contexts, lessons from these projects could be useful all over the world.

07:48But to make this happen in the first place, they just might have to cut some red tape,

07:52which is something Heidelberg's planners know all about.

07:56We have to be incredibly careful that none of the materials we collect here are technically

08:02considered waste.

08:03Then it becomes a whole big thing.

08:05And the second that happens, only specific companies are allowed to handle it.

08:11And with individual urban mining projects starting to pop up all over the place, governments

08:17will have to help coordinate these complicated logistics.

08:21And they'll also have to step in to help overcome what might be the biggest challenge

08:25cost.

08:26Incentivizing urban mining and making it cheaper will help drive change, but it will still

08:31take time.

08:33Projects like Heidelberg's Patrick Henry Village redevelopment are a start, but also

08:37show just how much has to change to get within a sniff of those goals.

Category

Transcript

Recommended