Dam busters: a structure is removed on the Hučava River in Slovakia, June 2021. Photograph: Rob Kleinjans
“An increasing number of governments, NGOs, companies and communities are understanding the importance of halting and reversing nature loss, and buying into the fact that dam removal is a river-restoration tool that boosts biodiversity and enhances climate resilience. We’re also seeing lessons being learned from previous dam removals, new countries kickstarting removals, and new funds, including crowdfunding.”
This film explores the evolution of our national attitude from pride in big dams as engineering wonders to the growing awareness that our own future is bound to the life and health of wild rivers.
Initiatives include talks with the University of British Columbia Okanagan on research programs, and a building deconstruction pilot program. A city-owned property on KLO Road was deconstructed a few weeks ago in partnership with Unbuilders and Habitat for Humanity.
The rear of the home has multi-level patios and sitting areas and a heated pool and spa. Eddie Avenue Photography
This unusual new spec house in the Virginia suburbs offers an old-fashioned mix of hardwood flooring milled from trees on the property and reclaimed materials from the former house on the site that’s been paired with ultra-modern features.
Traditional Argentine barbecues date back to the 16th century. One inventor created a new twist on the custom, turning discarded fruit from cider production into logs that can replace firewood and charcoal.
These include existing wooden and terrazzo flooring that was salvaged during the renovation, as well as heaters obtained from resource-efficient building material platform Concular.
While the former monastery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, that does not prohibit the building from being demolished. According to information on the National Register of Historic Places website. Owners’ rights do not change when the property is listed on the register.
There’s a growing movement in support of the Glen Canyon Dam Removal altogether. With the specter of climate change looming, those calls may grow louder. But whether or not you agree with that decision, there’s a lot to be learned from the history of the dam’s construction.
“The first is there is a lack of education for beginning professionals and those who want to upgrade their skills and knowledge, and there are virtually no courses in North American building circularity,” said Martens. “This is the first micro-credential in building circularity in Canada – and, I believe, in North America.”
Each piece of wood is marked with a unique QR codeDaniel Winkler/ETH Zurich
It’s a sad fact that even though our forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, new wooden structures are typically made of all-new wood. A special computer system could help change that, by facilitating the use of wood reclaimed from existing buildings.
The project would allow unlimited mechanized cutting and removal of live and dead trees of any age up to 2 feet in diameter and an undisclosed number of trees up to 5 feet in diameter, as well as the destruction of chaparral across 755 acres.
Ava Mandoli/The Daily Northwestern. Sustainability is part of the Evanston Rebuilding Warehouse’s deconstruction practices, as well as its retail location’s construction. Some of the store’s walls have been reclaimed from other buildings and are reinforced with scrap material.
“We want to make sure we get those barriers removed, make sure that we get the supportive services in place,” Nicklin said. “So that they get into a job, and they’ve got their gas figured out. They’ve got their childcare figured out. They’ve got everything ready to go because they’ve practiced it.” The transitional employment program connects participants with local employers, which allows them to support themselves and their families. The program has a job placement rate of over 80%, Nicklin said.
Nguyen Ngoc Anh, 36, who was an illegal logger turned forest protector poses at Phong Nha National Park, Quang Binh province, Vietnam, April 8, 2022. REUTERS/Hoang Trung
Now, Ngoc Anh is one of 250 former loggers trained by an adventure tourism company to lead mostly foreign tourists through jungles and into some of the world’s largest cave systems in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site.
In this file photo, a truck carries logs through the Tillamook State Forest. Amelia Templeton
The court determined that Oregon can manage more than 700,000 acres of donated forestland for a range of values like recreation, water quality and wildlife habitat — not just logging.
“This work really demonstrates the power of bringing together different disciplines, from synthetic biology to chemical engineering to artificial intelligence,” said Andrew Ellington, professor in the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology whose team led the development of the machine learning model.
A government program designed to train women in carpentry and other trades inspired five women from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, located east of Toronto, Ont., to build tiny homes that will serve as shelters for those fleeing domestic violence. (CTV News)
“It just proves anybody can build. The trade is not gender-specific, my mom was a carpenter and she built our house,” Chief R. Donald Maracle told CTV National News.“It’s good to see women entering the trades.”
An old-growth redwood tree named “Father of the Forest” in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California in August 2020. Some trees in the park have been standing for 2,000 years.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
“It’s a very good start on the things that we’ve been asking for,” said Kirin Kennedy, director of people and nature policy at the Sierra Club, one of the members of that coalition. She said her group is not necessarily calling for a moratorium on logging old-growth trees, but for a science-based approach to managing them. “We want to protect old trees, but we also want to make sure communities are protected,” said Kennedy.
The 100-meter-tall construction will follow a system which replaces a concrete core with wood. Credit: Aesthetica Studio/Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects
The project joins other architectural ventures looking to prove that timber can be used as a sustainable alternative to concrete and steel when building high-rises.
Akin Studio won the AJ Small Projects Award 2022 last week for its ‘treehouse’ in rural Herefordshire.
Have you learned anything in terms of materials on this project that you might use on other schemes? The clients are incredibly resourceful, and we learnt to embrace reclaimed materials, as well as the importance of reuse and considering the afterlife of building components. In the case of Drovers’ Bough, the exposed structural elements are all carefully bolted together allowing for future disassembly or replacement, and many parts of the project were made from surplus materials or reclaimed products.
We met up with John J. Bauters, Mayor of Emeryville, CA to learn more about his experience as arguably one of the most bike-friendly mayors in the U.S. In this rider story, John takes us on a tour of Emeryville, talks about his upbringing, and how others can inspire change no matter what city they live in.
The roof of ZGF’s new terminal for Portland International Airport will be constructed from locally sourced cross-laminated timber. Credit: Port of Portland
“Acting at scale is so eminently possible,” Lindsay Baker told me. She is the CEO of the International Living Futures Institute (IFLI), which runs the Living Building Challenge, an extraordinarily rigorous certification program that has pushed the building industry to achieve energy use reductions deemed all but impossible a few years ago.
A structure printed with concrete and a 3D printer by manufacturer Alquist. Courtesy: Alquist
To mitigate the logistical challenges, the City of John Day applied for and won a grant from the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. Now Walker and the City of John Day have $60,000 to develop plans for a practical 3D-printed home.
Hotel Brooklyn Bridge will have you booking a room for the views of the eponymous man-made wonder yet reveling in the amenities upon your arrival. Billed as a hotel of “sustainable luxury,” the five-star hotel was designed by location artists using reclaimed materials and native greenery, lending to the tranquility of the space.
Dan Evans was one of the designers of the two-mile long structure that stood as an alternative to the busy city streets and boasted impressive views of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains.
“Just like a certain song or fragrance can have an incredible emotional impact on us, we believe design has the same power to evoke positive memories and feelings,” said Boronkay. “The combination of reclaimed materials paired with rich and tactile fabrics, curated objects from around Europe and personal touches in the different spaces will make you feel like you are being embraced by an interesting individual.”
The eco-friendly fashion designer sources her materials from a nearby industrial estate to create her looks.
Jam Press/@broke_boutique
A London-based fashion designer is turning recycled rubber into 1970s punk rock-inspired accessories.East Londoner G Martin, 34, repurposed nearly 688 pounds of rubber that would be piling up in landfills by turning it into rockin’ recycled fashion pieces.
Luna Wilds, an “off-grid” spa just outside Brighton in East Sussex, is a new retreat built with reclaimed materials, says Jane Dunford in The Guardian.
Ten companies focused on reducing carbon emissions and waste, preserving water and protecting ecosystems have been selected to take part in Microsoft’s AI for Environmental Sustainability Accelerator programme.
Yes Make is helping design London’s public spaces with reclaimed materials from other developments
Artist Dolan Geiman of Denver readies his sculptures and collages = made from reclaimed materials – in preparation for a past Main St. Arts Festival. The festival returns April 7 downtown.
In February, festival officials announced that PNC Bank signed on as a long-term supporting member of the festival.
In function of the production and supply of materials from urban mining, we act as the main contractor for the dismantling of buildings. These activities are accommodated in New Horizon Urban Mining .
They monitored and compared the material’s performance, finding that the crumb rubber had higher impact-resistance, toughness, ductility, damping ratio and better thermal and acoustic insulation. “The results clearly show that crumb rubber cement is a viable and promising alternative to conventional concrete,” says author of the study Professor Yan Zhuge.
Ecologist Michelle Connolly standing among cedar trees in the inland temperate rainforest near Penny, BC. The inland rainforest gets much less attention from environmental groups than BC’s coastal rainforests, but it is an even rarer ecosystem.
In 2021, Connolly co-authored a peer-reviewed study that found that BC’s inland rainforest — which once totaled over 1.3 million hectares — was endangered, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature criteria, and could experience ecological collapse within a decade if current logging rates continue. The study found that 95 percent of its core habitat, forest located more than 100 meters from a road, had been lost since 1970. “We’re fighting over the last pieces,” Connolly says.
The construction industry is responsible for over a tenth of the world’s man-made carbon emissions, with concrete being the biggest culprit. How can we continue to build, without it costing the earth?
Logs are stacked high in this aerial view of Viking Lumber’s sawmill in Klawock, Alaska. SEAKdrones LLC
Land exchanges have allowed lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to bypass the Roadless Rule and other environmental protections and transfer ownership of thousands of acres of old-growth Tongass National Forest, opening the land up for logging.
He reflected on what this abundance of waste could mean in a region with limited economic activity. The result? An ambitious, wide-ranging waste management company Wiper dubbed 3F Waste Recovery. “3F is founded on the principle that every molecule that comes through our door, we want to have an application for it,” Wiper explains. “My vision is the landfill of the future—where producers can take anything they haven’t processed, to break it down into a form that has a function.”
This van has a distinctive Nordic feel (Picture: D+)
‘It’s pretty tragic that there’s no second-hand market value as some vehicles might be 20 years-old but they only have only 40,000 miles on the clock. I guess we are scrap angels – we see their potential and love the challenge of giving them a new purpose by turning them into something fun, useful and really cool.’
Talk at the meeting centered on the best practices of the time: reconnecting the stream with some of its floodplains by reclaiming adjacent property, removing armoring and reintroducing native plants along the banks. Lynch boldly told the group the project should go further: rebuild the missing hyporheic zone. That would mean reclaiming space under the stream, filling it with sand and gravel and potentially bringing back the zone’s tiny inhabitants.
Why are we still demolishing buildings when we can design for deconstruction? In this episode, Arup structural engineer Grace Di Benedetto explains that we need to change our mindset and recognise buildings as valuable sources of materials rather than rubble.
Hello my name is Stephen Taylor and in 2016 I bought a derelict shop in Birkenhead, U.K for £26,000 at auction. This building was in such a poor state that the guide price at auction was just £10,000 – £12,000. With a lot of hard work over the last five years I have now transformed it into a modern four bedroom home.
“[Regular people are] competing against the largest private equity firm in the world to purchase a home,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “In fact, companies like Blackstone, Zillow and Bedrock are buying up to 15 percent of available homes – but what I find interesting here is that they’re purchasing them in minority and low-income neighborhoods specifically.”
“We see the tree cover being swapped out for impervious cover, which means when we look at the photographs, what was there is now replaced with a parking lot or a building,” Nowak said.
Hand in hand with this change comes a glut of what might be termed ‘compromised buildings’ standing empty. In the context of the climate crisis, the tendency to replace these stranded assets with new-build is unattractive and wasteful – instead we need to look at options for skilful reworking that embraces their embedded character to create unique solutions that are ready for the new world of work.
Square Platter “Honeycomb”, curved Serving platter 12″
Clear window glass meets wire. You’d swear the wire is still there. Believe me, it’s not — just its spectacular and forever glowing trace.
Every piece is cut from used window-type glass, and kiln-fired over molds that give them their new form, as well as a brand new life.
Core-shell architecture of a nanofibrillar PEDOT-coated brick electrode lights up a green LED. Credit: D’Arcy Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis
The bricks are powerful enough to illuminate an LED light bulb and cost only about $3 to make.
COURTESY CAROLINE PERRON PHOTOGRAPHIES — Three years in the making, the patented machine cleans 99 per cent of a brick through a process involving a concrete grinder that allows the cleaning of the brick extremities.
Chifa says Maçonnerie Gratton calculates the brick recycling machine can eliminate up to 5.9 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the restoration of a 1,000 square foot brick wall. “Throughout Quebec and Canada this means a lot because we are all about bricks,” Stoia says. The recycling machine “sets the tone” for municipalities and the province to consider legislation on the reuse of construction materials. She adds recycling bricks for reuse helps to conserve Quebec’s architectural past.
