Recycling an old US military base
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?
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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.