Australians love to dream about and construct their forever homes, but what's often ignored is what happens when these buildings reach the end of their life. Many working with housing waste say addressing this is key to creating a sustainable building industry, and one regional Victorian company is seeking to do just that.
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00:00On the outskirts of Castlemaine, a treasure trove of materials salvaged from old buildings
00:07lies waiting for a new life.
00:10Business owners Matt and Anna have spent decades building with, and selling, second-hand construction
00:14materials.
00:15We've become such a kind of throwaway world that we kind of, and the stuff we're throwing
00:19away is quite often awesome and better quality than what we've got now.
00:24They want to inspire others to reduce waste by reusing what's available.
00:28What we're constantly trying to do is impart our creative thinking onto other people that
00:34may not be able to see it or inherently value that resource.
00:40Developing a greener construction industry is seen as key to reducing Australia's carbon
00:44emissions and landfill.
00:45In fact, around 18 to 20% of emissions are generated by our sector, by construction sector,
00:52and about 40% of the total landfill comes from construction waste.
00:57And while reusing existing materials is a good start, Dr Kodja Turk says the industry
01:02needs to change its thinking.
01:04When we design new buildings, we would ideally not design them for one life cycle in mind.
01:10Imagine a building which is designed to be disassembled and dismantled so that its different
01:16materials and parts could be used in future constructions, for example.
01:21Builder and engineer Quentin Irvine tried to achieve that in a house near Ballarat.
01:25So it was all that kind of big picture stuff that we achieved.
01:28There's probably like a good sort of 10% of that building that's not really recyclable.
01:32He says a major challenge is the common use of composite materials containing glues and
01:37plastics, which often can't be reprocessed into new products later on.
01:41Yeah, people generally, when they think about houses, think that houses are going to last
01:44forever.
01:45And I'm here to bring the bad news that they're not going to last forever.
01:49Using the past to build a better future.