At 90 per cent, the K-Briq offers “the highest recycled content of any brick” currently on the market.
To tackle these problems, brick manufacturers and researchers are increasingly looking at how to make use of local waste materials to create masonry units, as well as reverting to traditional methods of sun-drying to cut out the need for firing.
Source: Seven alternative bricks made of reclaimed waste and biomaterials
Supply issues have also driven up the costs of building materials, with brick prices up by an average of 9 per cent, timber and roof tiles up by 8 per cent and insulation increasing by 16 per cent. More than half of the firms surveyed said increased material prices were squeezing their margins, and 56 per cent said they had to pass costs on to their customers.
BOSTON — A Billerica waste hauling company has paid $62,500 to settle claims that it illegally dumped construction and demolition waste at an unauthorized site in Methuen.The attorney general says W.L. French Excavating Corp. violated Massachusetts state law by dumping 29 loads of waste, including concrete, bricks and asphalt.
via 2 waste removal companies targeted in state crackdown | Boston Herald.
Photo by Ian Hicks
The “flood wall,” she said, always has held a special place in her heart, and while the building may be beyond saving, she doesn’t want to see the object of those childhood memories wind up in a local landfill.
“I used to see this thing every day and I just loved it …,” Henry said. “Maybe one day we could build a monument out of it. … So much of Wheeling’s history has already been demolished or destroyed. At least the city could save this.”
Whatever is left at buildings slated for demolition – including the remnants of the structure itself – generally become the property of the demolition contractor. Edge said he may be open to trying to salvage the bricks from the flood wall, depending on how much time and effort is involved.
via Bricks From ‘Flood Wall’ Wanted – News, Sports, Jobs – The Intelligencer / Wheeling News-Register.
Matt Sears examines a wooden beam of the demolished building at Market and Main streets in Chattanooga. Photo by Contributed Photo /Chattanooga Times Free Press .
Thick poplar trees covered the Tennessee Valley a hundred years ago. But they were steadily cut down and used as lumber, and now the old-growth wood is nearly impossible to find.
“It’s not available in stores, and there is a limited quantity of it left in the world,” said Matt Sears, owner of Haskel Sears Design, which makes wooden furniture.
Which is why he was excited to find 25-foot-long old-growth poplar floor and ceiling joists in the old brick building on the southeast corner of Main and Market streets. The building has since been demolished to make room for a new mixed-use apartment and retail complex.
But not before Sears got the wood out.
“We pulled the building down without disturbing the valuable materials inside of it,” Sears said. “We also discovered some pine beams and some steel beams that had Woolworth’s stamped on them.”
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/75760193]
Chinneck spent the better part of 12 months engineering the installation and worked with several companies that offered to donate materials. He tells Dezeen that he’s fascinated with spectacles and that he “wanted to create something that used the simple pleasures of humour, illusion and theatre to create an artwork that can be understood and enjoyed by any onlooker.”
The piece will be on view for a year before the building is eventually demolished. Read and see more over on Dezeen.
via A Brick Facade Appears to Melt Off of an Apartment Building in Margate | Colossal.
“There are millions of brick buildings in the world,” says REBRICK project coordinator Claus Nielsen of Denmark’s Gamle Mursten. “Every time one of these building is demolished the bricks have the potential to become part of a new building and a new story.
“Bricks can easily last for several centuries, but those found in demolition waste are simply thrown out or, at best, crushed and used as aggregate material for low grade applications such as sub-base and road construction.”
The REBRICK system, now patented by Gamle Mursten, automatically cleans concrete and cement from old bricks. The bricks can then be reused in building construction.
Nielsen says, “By reusing old bricks and transferring their history and applying their character to new buildings, they become tangible examples of the potential that is hidden in demolition debris.”
Project partners have made remarkably rapid progress, with two full-scale brick-cleaning facilities operating in Denmark in less than two years. They now intend to establish additional sites in other countries, including Poland and Germany, where demolition sectors are very active.
via European Commission : CORDIS : Newsroom : ‘New old bricks’ for the construction industry.
The new kiln combines traditional brick building techniques with contemporary equipment. While the walls of most kilns are between 4 and 9 inches thick, the new kiln, nicknamed “Reclaim,” has walls that are 11½ inches thick. This extra girth is provided by an outer layer of hundred-year-old red bricks recovered from a building that was recently torn down. A range of glaze colors was developed in class and applied to this outer layer of bricks, giving the kiln its distinctive multi-colored jacket.
Bricks, more than a century old, were glazed by students to create a colorful and functional exterior wall for the “Reclaim” kiln.
via Faculty, students build new kiln from recycled materials | Penn State University.
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Zawelski Architecture Group came up with this solution in part to retain the character of the existing brick structure, but also to establish an exterior zone that would still be relatively private in the face of multiple busy adjacent streets.
Read the entire article via Sandwich House: Addition Turns Brick A-Frame to Green Box | Designs & Ideas on Dornob.
A good design should use as few resources as possible, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to build a structure using recycled materials. Architects Joshua Bolchover and John Lin of Rufwork have designed the Tongjiang Primary School with exactly this concept in mind. The school in the Jianxi Province of southeast China was built using recycled bricks from old broken down houses in the same district, salvaging these materials in innovative ways.
Read the entire article via Tongjiang Primary School in Rural China is Made from Recycled Bricks | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building.