Designing buildings with the end of their useful life in mind means construction materials can be recycled and re-used in a new project. But the salvage operation means added time and cost

Just five years after it was introduced in Portland, two out of three condemned homes in the city are taken down this way, each one saving 7.6 tonnes of CO2. In that time the number of contractors has grown from two to 15, helping to reduce deconstruction costs until, by 2019, one in 10 development projects chose deconstruction over demolition voluntarily. But despite the huge potential benefits, the total impact on the amount of rubble sent to landfill has been small: today, the entire city has deconstructed a little over 350 buildings.

In principle, replacing demolition with deconstruction, could make a huge dent in the construction industry’s outsized CO2 footprint – 39% of global emissions at latest count, according to the World Green Building Council. Taking buildings to bits means salvaging re-usable parts and recycling materials, reducing the huge quantities of construction and demolition waste that ends up in landfill.

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