Recycling your rubble

If you’re demolishing a 1960s tower block to build a new residential development, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use the smashed up concrete already on site as aggregate? Apart from doing your bit for the country’s groaning landfill sites, you’d be saving cash on both landfill tax and aggregate levy.

At least one London council, Brent, home of the new Wembley Stadium, thinks so. It has enshrined this principal as a consideration in giving planning consent.

And other councils will follow if the authors of the Demolition Protocol have their way. A combined effort of the Institute of Civil Engineers, London Remade and the EnviroCentre, the Demolition Protocol sets out a method of deciding how to use what’s already on a building site to make the new building

– a concept that has attracted the highfalutin term “urban quarry”.

At least one demolition contractor has already jumped on the bandwagon. J Freely of Manchester claims it recycled the “best part” of an old hospital near Blackpool last year. Around 100,000 slates went for housing in the North West; 125,000 roof tiles went to the Midlands; 500,000 bricks went around the UK, Europe and the US. Markets were also found for roof timbers, iron, steel, aluminium, brass and copper.

At an estimated 90m tonnes per year, demolition waste is the biggest contributor of landfill in the UK.