
Why We Need to Reuse Construction Materials
Ever since I studied interior design in grad school, I’ve been intrigued by the idea of a circular economy, one in which materials are used and reused through remanufacturing and reclaiming. When it comes to homes and buildings, this practice is known as “deconstruction,” which describes the careful dismantling of existing structures in order to give their parts—foundation, framing, roofing and finishes—a new purpose somewhere else. I didn’t realize how rare (and sometimes controversial) deconstruction was, however, until I moved from New York to Toronto with my husband in 2019. At that time, I was working as a designer with a condo-focused firm on renovations and new builds and saw firsthand how much waste there was. After COVID kicked off a countrywide reno blitz, I’d see piles of old-growth lumber, trim and heritage doors (all of them in usable shape) piled up in dumpsters on people’s front lawns.
A tipping point came in 2021 with my own reno on our family’s 1920s-era semi. When I explained—to 10 different contractors—that I wanted to reuse as much of my home’s old material as possible, they replied, “It’s all trash. That would take too long. That’s not how it’s done.” But I knew better. I decided then to put together my own deconstruction team. By 2022, it was an official business with clients, several employees and a name: Ouroboros Deconstruction, after the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, which represents the never-ending cycle of creation and destruction.
Demolition is now the construction industry’s default setting, but this wasn’t always the case. Deconstruction (also known as “hand demolition”) was the norm before and during the Second World War, when scrap materials like metal and rubber were reused to make planes, tanks and weapons. After the war, demand for housing skyrocketed due to immigration (and returning soldiers). The government reassigned its military bulldozers to residential projects, and the market ethos we know now was born: knock it down, discard any debris and build anew.
That mentality has had serious environmental consequences: more than a third of all global emissions come from the construction of homes and buildings. Forty per cent of Canada’s landfills, which are quickly running out of space, consist of construction- and demolition-related waste. When a 2,000-square-foot home is demolished, it produces enough waste to fill about seven 40-yard dumpsters. (That’s equivalent to more than half of the waste a single person produces over the course of their entire lifetime.) In addition, new builds often use a lot of synthetic materials, like vinyls and plastics. Those may be cheap and easy to source, but they can be extremely fuel-intensive to produce, many contain cancer-causing chemicals and, unlike some of the vintage wood and stone recycled from deconstruction projects, have no real lasting value.
The deconstruction process, though it can be slower than demolition, has the key advantage of care: during a gut, Ourobouros team members meticulously take apart building interiors in stages. (For larger projects, we partner with various tradespeople to accommodate a building’s scale.) The materials—such as insulation and drywall—are sorted into bins. Then, the materials are resold or sent to recycling partners. Take lumber, for example: under the current Ontario building code, salvaged lumber can’t be reused for structural purposes. Ouroboros commissions a certified inspector and an engineer to regrade it, then resells those lumber packages. Plenty of that wood comes from first-generation or old-growth trees, which is much tougher material than what’s on the market today. The economics behind it are good, too: at least 14,000 board feet of framing lumber can be reclaimed from a 2,000-square-foot timber-frame home.
In some cases, the homeowners choose to reuse the materials themselves. In the case of my home reno, we salvaged all of the old doors, baseboards and trim. Quarter-sawn white oak, pulled from the floors, was later repurposed as wall panelling. Many of the original two-by-four stud walls were reused to make non-load-bearing walls. In the end, Ouroboros averages a 90 per cent landfill diversion rate. Canada may not yet have huge numbers of deconstruction firms, but even at a small scale, the environmental impact of deconstruction is easy to see.
Canada needs to build approximately 22 million new housing units by 2030. For deconstruction to make a big enough dent, it’ll need to scale up and be more regularly employed in larger buildings. To accomplish this, Canada first needs more dedicated storage space for salvaged materials. We should consider establishing land-share agreements with the government, where deconstruction companies could store their salvage on empty plots at reduced rent prices. We could also potentially give tax breaks to developers in exchange for free salvage storage—many of their sites sit vacant for years before projects break ground. We’ll also need to get the materials into the hands of people who can use them. Already, Light House, a circular-construction think tank in B.C., has launched a small “matchmaking service” called the Building Material Exchange, which connects local businesses to builders keen to reuse so-called waste.
Progress will also come from policy changes—incentives like expedited permitting for deconstruction projects. Cities like San Antonio in Texas and Palo Alto in California have already mandated deconstruction for older buildings. Palo Alto did so back in 2020 with the specific intention of minimizing the amount of waste headed to its landfills, nearly half of which used to come from construction and demolition projects. (Last year, roughly 92 per cent of the waste from its residential projects was successfully diverted.)
Here in Canada, Vancouver’s Green Demolition Bylaw, introduced in 2014, requires 75 to 90 per cent of materials (by weight) to be reused or recycled—and at least three metric tonnes of wood to be salvaged—from any building listed on the Vancouver Heritage Register or built before 1910. This policy is a core part of Vancouver’s Zero Waste 2040 program. The city was an impressively early adopter, to be sure, but we need many more to catch on.
Canada is a country of vast natural resources, and many of them are just sitting idle—or being blown to dust. One of my long-time dream projects is the deconstruction of 24 Sussex Drive, the Prime Minister’s official residence. I always thought it was a shame that a symbol of Canada would be allowed to slowly decay to the point of being uninhabitable. I imagined its materials—like limestone and old-growth wood—being used toward building a new, more energy-efficient residence. I’m happy that when the property was finally decommissioned, its fixtures were carefully disassembled and put into storage. I hope that the next inhabitants of 24 Sussex Drive will see the value of sustainability and give them a second chance.
Meredith Moore is the founder and CEO of Ouroboros Deconstruction in Toronto.