A crate of reclaimed floor tiles sits on a table at Rotor DC’s Brussels warehouse. Micheal Ghyoot, a researcher in architectural reuse and project manager at the cooperative, picks out a square cement tile patterned in blue, gray and white. He points to its art nouveau floral motif and notes how producers shifted to more modern designs in the 1930s and 40s — styles that, he says, are equally compelling.
The tile crate is one of dozens of boxes holding a wide variety of salvaged items: tiles in many sizes and colours waiting to be cleaned and listed for resale; tall, solid wood doors with original handles leaning against a wall; large, gold-tinted office windows rescued from a mid-century building. Outside, a photographer lines up bathroom sinks on wet grass to stage product shots for the online store.
Since opening a shop in a former office building in late 2016, Rotor DC has championed urban mining in Brussels. Material scouts identify buildings scheduled for demolition, and specialists remove anything that can be reused — from Murano glass light fittings to oak floors and handmade brickwork. Rotor is a cooperative focused on resale and design practice: it advises projects that want to incorporate reclaimed components and publishes research on sustainability, circularity and the material economy.
Similar operations exist elsewhere in Belgium, across Europe and in North America. But while salvaging and resale are growing, reuse in construction remains a relatively small part of the industry.
Reuse is hardly a new idea. Medieval builders frequently incorporated elements from Roman ruins, but industrialisation and modern manufacturing shifted construction toward new products. The whole building system — procurement, liability, regulation, scheduling, insurance and technical standards — was structured around new materials, says Areti Markopoulou, academic director at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. As a result, direct component reuse — returning windows, doors, beams, facade elements, sanitary fittings and flooring to service — is far less common than lower-grade recycling or downcycling.
There are many practical barriers. Deconstructing a building carefully to preserve components takes time and skill. Storing and certifying rescued parts is expensive. Suppliers of reclaimed materials are irregular, making it harder to guarantee a consistent match for new projects. Older items can be degraded, contaminated with toxins, or difficult to dismantle safely. As Ghyoot puts it, adopting secondhand materials requires rethinking design, workflows and collaboration with builders.
Because careful disassembly is less efficient than crushing, much demolition waste is reduced to rubble and used as backfill. Construction and demolition waste makes up more than a third of all rubbish in the EU. The broader environmental cost is significant: the building sector consumes roughly half of all extracted materials in the EU, and associated greenhouse gas emissions are estimated at 5–12% of national totals. Reuse matters not only because it diverts waste, Markopoulou says, but because it can avoid the emissions tied to producing new materials.
A 2019 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation highlighted that reusing steel, aluminium, concrete and plastic could reduce demand for virgin materials. Moving toward circular-economy strategies could cut the global building sector’s emissions by as much as 40% by 2050.
Despite those potential gains, persuading contractors and architects to integrate reclaimed materials remains a challenge. Change can add complexity and cost, and salvaged items rarely provide a steady stream of identical parts. Rotor DC initially carried out much of the salvage and preparation work itself. Over time the cooperative found it more effective to buy reclaimed elements from private sellers and, crucially, from general contractors and demolition teams. Ghyoot says the obstacle was not a lack of skill on the contractors’ part; when there is a financial incentive, teams are much more willing to take the time to remove components carefully.
Digital tools and artificial intelligence offer another route to scale recovery efforts. Markopoulou and her team are exploring how data sources such as Google Street View, aerial imagery, 3D scans, cadastral records and permit data can be combined to estimate what materials and components exist across a city, when they are likely to become available and in what quantities. Pilots in Barcelona, New Delhi, Helsinki and Singapore suggest that while AI cannot identify every reusable window or beam, it can estimate urban material stocks well enough to support planning at city scale.
Those technological advances, she argues, need policy support: financial incentives, mandatory energy certificates, and the introduction of material or building passports — detailed records of a structure’s components — would make reuse easier to plan and more reliable. Ultimately it is a shift in mindset: buildings have long been treated as permanent objects, but designers and planners must start thinking about where materials will go at the end of a structure’s life.
Back at Rotor DC, the rescued tiles, doors and windows tell a smaller, more practical version of that larger ambition. Each salvaged element reduces demand for newly extracted materials, preserves craftsmanship, and offers homeowners and designers choices rich in history and character. For those working to widen the practice, turning demolition waste into a resource is both a technical challenge and an opportunity to reconfigure how buildings are made and remade.