Armenian scientists Gregor Mnatsakanyan and Vahan Hamazaspyan originally created the satellite dishes with dreams of distributing them around the country. Hamazaspyan, a pioneer in the study of solar energy use, began developing the first prototypes in the 1980s, after the devastating Spitak earthquake. Satellite solar ovens, he hoped, would feed his countrymen affordably during hard times
A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner bark of the plant that usually ends up in landfill.
“We have used materials in every room, but the main area seems to be the kitchen,” she says, noting walnut as a popular choice for kitchen island tops. “As this is the main room people always seem to congregate in, reclaimed materials serve as conversation starters.”
Stone on the 7,000-square-foot house came from an early 1800s barn in upstate Pennsylvania. The arches in the porte-cochère and entrance are an homage to the house where Maggie Polisano grew up in Florida.
ALEJANDRO A. ALVAREZ / Staff Photographer
“The brick in the mudroom is from a demo in South Philly, the Belgian block is from a demo under the Ben Franklin Bridge, the large ceiling beams are from a barn in upstate N.Y., and the supports for the glass shelves behind the bar are bucket hooks from our horse stables.”
But in a world where Americans throw out more than 12 million tons of furniture per year, it has also championed circular design by breathing new life in Danish castoffs, carving itself a cozy (dare I say hygge) niche in an oversaturated furniture market.
Intrinsic in the mission of all three designers is the desire to prove that sustainable interior design methods are just as useful and effective as environmentally unfriendly counterparts. “When you’re working with waste it can obviously come with negative connotations,” El Baz says. “But through good design and good material research, we’re trying to show that there really isn’t an aesthetic difference in the outcome.”
A simple form with a steeply pitched roof and some quirky detailing makes this house stand out in its suburban setting. Image: Camille Khouri
The owner also found “these beautiful old rimu doors, which add to the industrial aesthetic inside. The main front door has stained glass panels. We were trying to balance the use of reclaimed materials with the thermal performance of the building, so these internal doors were an easy addition.”
Gerry Theodorakis stands at the main entrance to the castle, where a Georgian-style columned portico will soon be built. Photo: Leah Szanto
Gerry likes to use reclaimed materials wherever possible and has sourced many stunning additions to both the structure of the residence and the décor contained within, including tiles embedded with fossils, French period-style lighting and solid handcrafted antique timber furniture, most of which is very ornate. “I detest waste and always use as many recycled materials as I possibly can,” he said.
The approved plans for the block include the development of 62 dwelling units, configured as 31 duplexes rising up to 35 feet in height, with 28 two-bedrooms, 34 three-bedrooms, a total of 62 off-street parking spaces and a 0.38-acre public park/community garden/open space on the southwest corner of the block, with two rebuilt greenhouses and a new “boiler house” shed, leveraging reclaimed materials from the existing structures “as feasible.”
“The warehouses were cut into and modified, while retaining the memory of their historic boundaries,” Bodecker said. “Peeling back the roof of one and slicing the other, the warehouses were remixed and fused together with a new central core building.”
Belgian office BLAF Architecten built GjG House in the city of Ghent entirely out of reclaimed bricks. The building has an irregular shape that is reflected in its curvaceous interior spaces.
Created from recycled MO barn tin, expect a varied look including but not limited to nail holes and some rust. Each piece made with recycled corrugated barn tin from actual barns so will have years of patina on them.
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The aim of the Super Circular Department Store project was to reimagine waste materials as a valuable local resource by exploring how department stores could create marketable stock from their own refuse.
The building’s facades are made using timber offcuts and approximately 700 windows donated by the community. The fixtures were measured, repaired and assigned a position using computer software, creating a seemingly random yet precise patchwork effect.
Working with the existing layout and in a bid to reduce waste where possible, many areas around the home which still functioned perfectly received a light touch, whilst other rooms were transformed with reclaimed materials and timeless decor.
Although the timbers used in the cottage’s construction have been tree ringed, dating back to 1414 – it is thought they were not built until around 1648 by Rev Bryan of Holy Trinity Church, using reclaimed materials from other building projects.
Studio Drift deconstructed a VW Beetle into its constituent materials
“I think they’re some of the most important architects working today because they don’t believe in demolition,” McGuirk said. “The sheer waste of embodied carbon and energy is ludicrous.”
Steve Pierson of Crude Luthier with one of his guitars at a 24th Street art walk last week. Photo by Anlan Cheney.
If he’s not collaborating with an artist, he likes to show off the reclaimed wood. He is partial to redwood from his old deck, red wine vats from Sonoma County, and the torn down polo fields in Golden Gate Park. The latter “is magical wood,” he said, “It just sings.”
The walls, floors and furniture incorporate local reclaimed materials from sources like dead or dying trees and trees downed in the ice storm of 2018, made by Toronto reclaimed-wood-working studio Just Be Woodsy.
The building was developed to meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Gold standards and Puget Sound Energy’s Built Smart guidelines, with construction including reclaimed materials from the warehouse that used to occupy the site.
Seattle-based Heliotrope Architects has designed the renovation of the Filson NYC Flagship Store in mid-town Manhattan. It all originated with the conversion of a mattress shop that now houses an old barn, the central element in the architectural storytelling of the new shop.
Koya House is listed with RsR Real Estate at Compass for $1.589m, having been overhauled using reclaimed materials, concrete and a monochrome colour palette to modernise its 1920s shell.
Scotia Lodge is so much more than just a hotel, rather it is a piece of the region’s rich and storied history.
Similar to the other ventures under the Humboldt Social brand, the design aesthetic of Scotia Lodge highlights the history and beauty of the North Coast, with an emphasis on reclaimed materials, vintage furnishings and lots of natural light.
Julie Denesha/ Performing on an improvised stage, trombonist Trevor Turla plays to the gathered crowd at The Raj Ma Hall, an outdoor concert venue in the Historic Northeast.
The yard is distinctive thanks to three rustic houses built from reclaimed materials. They’re the work of Roger MacBride, the sculptor and artist who lives here.
A brick house in Trivandrum, in the Indian state of Kerala, was built to maximise the performance of the materials used by its designers, Wallmakers architects, who completed the building with reclaimed timber and metal.
The new collection, Trucioli – a thin, curly piece of material shaved from a bigger piece – takes these brass shavings, coats them in gold and hand paints them in epoxy resin for joyful and sustainable designs.
Brass jewellery from Italian brand So-Le Studio makes good use of metal offcuts
As manufacturers are working to reuse their waste products — both through upcycled products that save food items from the trash and manufacturing processes that use waste for energy — a successful test result could put Kraft Heinz in a class of its own. The company could potentially renovate its factories with its own post-consumer waste, which would be impactful.
Engineered by 3D printing specialists WASP and designed by Mario Cucinella Architects, the first prototype of TECLA in Ravenna is built entirely using reusable and recyclable materials.
By becoming the first eco-habitat to be built using Crane WASP (world’s first modular and multilevel 3D printer designed to collectively build singular and large-scale architectural works), the structure takes inspiration from potter wasp, founded on the principles of a circular economy and digital fabrication.
The yellow pine that was used to build Baltimore’s rowhouses came from old-growth forests, and is more dense and rot-resistant than faster-growing new lumber; a century of oxidation has given it a handsome, dark patina. Furniture-makers and interior designers play up its provenance, designing items around its joist- and plank-shaped pieces, some of them pocked with nail holes and saw marks.
There has also been a shift towards repurposed or ethically sourced, natural materials. “Homeowners should keep this in mind when doing any renovations. Over time, likely, homes with environmentally friendly features, such as built-in cupboards made from reclaimed wood, solar panels, water-saving faucets, will become increasingly desirable, especially among younger buyers.
The whole of Providence was included on the 2021 list because of the many climate-change challenges the city faces. (Frank Carini/ecoRI News)
“We’ve been talking behind the scenes about how to infuse our preservation work with this mindset, and of course preservation is an inherently green practice, particularly with adaptive reuse of old buildings. So, this really gave us a great way to marry preservation and sustainability. It just gave us a great jumping-off point.”
The Forest Service is eager to support efforts to reclaim wood because it means fewer trees will be felled; it now coordinates with the city of Baltimore to identify properties destined for demolition and sends in crews from companies with expertise in deconstruction, including Brick+Board.
Cliff Williams / The Outlook Firefighters from the Eagle Creek Volunteer Fire Department served as pallbearers at the funeral of Leonard Cannie Mckelvey Thursday.
McKelvey was laid to rest in a casket made from reclaimed barn wood looking over the Eagle Creek Baptist Church and the Eagle Creek Volunteer Fire Department, both of which the carpenter helped build.
The barn, built in 1912, once deconstructed, was found to have some of its timber from many years before.
Inside a northwestern Connecticut home there’s now timber from an ancient “deconstructed” Branford barn, purchased to match the existing 19th century floorboards. In a house in the state’s northeastern corner, the barn’s 110-year-old doors now live. And, an artist purchased pieces of the barn built in 1912 for their studio.
If this experimental bridge is a success, it could be the first of many. Angela Nagle, a civil engineering Ph.D. student at the University College Cork who is investigating environmental, economic, and policy issues surrounding blade bridges, hopes to see dozens of them dotting the Irish countryside in the not-so-distant future. With 11,000 tons of blades expected to be decommissioned across Ireland by 2025, there should be no shortage of material to work with.
Christmas trees put out in the trash in Philadelphia’s Port Richmond neighborhood. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)
“By recycling them and returning them to the earth, we reduce our waste costs and create a valuable resource,” he said.Options include composting your tree, recycling it into chips, feeding the green to goats, turning it into a barrier to protect dunes from erosion, or even cooking, using pine needles like herbs.
This study suggests that salvaged lumber could potentially be a new source of raw material for mass timber products, which could create new opportunities for wood waste recovery and greener building products.
Salvaged lumber from Portland deconstruction practices was collected, graded, and processed for mass timber panel manufacturing.
The aesthetic combines the original Georgian features; exposed beams, plaster, eaves and brickwork, alongside contemporary craftsmanship and modern elements required for twenty-first century life.
Many of the windows in the home are not windows at all—they’re doors, turned sideways and repurposed as large awning-style windows. Margaret adds, “We don’t use air conditioners. We have no need for that in the summer because we get such a wonderful breeze through the house.” Ty Cole
The barn’s original floorboards, before and after. (Simón Rios/WBUR)
A demolition crew came in and did the best they could to salvage the floorboards. Their level of care was less than pristine — the boards came out splintered with with huge gouges left by pry bars and hammer blows — but I couldn’t afford to pay someone to take up each board with a soft touch.
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Julie Denesha/ Performing on an improvised stage, trombonist Trevor Turla plays to the gathered crowd at The Raj Ma Hall, an outdoor concert venue in the Historic Northeast.
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