Micheal Ghyoot carefully lifts a square of reclaimed cement tile from a crate, revealing an art nouveau floral motif in blue, gray and white. He points out how patterns shifted toward more modern designs in the 1930s and 1940s, making each piece both beautiful and historically telling.
The crate is one of many at Rotor DC, a Brussels cooperative that has made a business of salvaging and reselling building components since opening a shop in a former office building in late 2016. Boxes of tiles wait to be cleaned and catalogued while solid wood doors, brass-handled hardware and large mid-century windows line nearby walls. Staff photograph sinks on wet grass for the online catalogue; material scouts visit buildings slated for demolition and specialists carefully dismantle anything that can be reused.
Rotor is part of a wider movement in Belgium and beyond: reclaiming usable elements—Murano glass light fixtures, oak floorboards, handmade bricks—for new projects instead of sending them to landfill or grinding them into aggregate. The cooperative also advises architects and developers on integrating reclaimed parts and publishes research on circular material economies.
Why reuse matters
The construction industry has historically favored new materials. Modern procurement, liability rules, insurance and building standards were shaped around mass-produced goods, making intact reuse of components uncommon compared with lower-grade recycling or crushing. Yet construction and demolition waste still makes up more than a third of trash in the European Union. The sector consumes roughly half of extracted materials in the EU, with related greenhouse gas emissions constituting an estimated 5% to 12% of national totals.
Reusing whole components avoids the emissions tied to producing replacements and reduces the volume of waste. A 2019 Ellen MacArthur Foundation report estimated that circular strategies, including reuse of steel, aluminium, concrete and plastic, could cut global building-sector emissions by as much as 40% by 2050.
Practical hurdles keep reuse niche
Despite environmental benefits, reusing secondhand materials remains limited. “Direct component reuse in original form… is still less widespread than lower-grade recycling or downcycling,” says Areti Markopoulou, academic director at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. Challenges include the need for careful deconstruction, secure storage, material certification and the difficulty of aligning irregular salvaged supplies with specific project needs.
Older elements can be degraded, contain hazardous substances, or be hard to remove intact. Reuse often means rethinking design and construction workflows, adding complexity and sometimes cost. “You have to rethink how you design, how you organize the workflow, how you work with builders,” says Ghyoot, who manages projects at Rotor. That extra effort keeps the practice relatively niche.
In Rotor’s early years the cooperative performed most deconstruction and preparation work itself. Over time it developed a buyback system, paying contractors and demolition crews for reusable items. The financial incentive, Ghyoot says, made crews more willing to put in the care deconstruction requires; it wasn’t a lack of skill but the absence of reward.
Digital tools and AI to scale reuse
Researchers are exploring how data and artificial intelligence can help. Markopoulou and colleagues treat cities as vast material reservoirs and use sources like Google Street View, aerial photos, 3D scans, cadastral records and permit data to estimate building material stocks: timber, stone, steel, brick and more. Tested in cities including Barcelona, New Delhi, Helsinki and Singapore, these methods can’t identify every reusable window or beam, but they can predict urban material stocks well enough to plan reuse at city scale.
Such digital forecasting helps match future demand to likely supplies and can inform procurement, storage and logistics long before demolition or renovation begins. But Markopoulou cautions that these capabilities need policy support—mandatory energy performance certificates have nudged sustainable behavior, and material or building passports that record detailed information about a structure’s components could do the same for reuse.
A shift in mindset
Advancing material reuse requires changes across the built environment: different design standards, new financial incentives, supply-chain adjustments and regulatory frameworks that account for reused components. It also requires treating buildings as temporary stores of valuable materials rather than permanent, sealed objects.
“We need to design while taking into consideration where our materials will go after the lifespan of the building is over,” Markopoulou says. For Rotor and similar initiatives, that means combining hands-on deconstruction, resale systems and research into digital tools, while persuading contractors, architects and policymakers that reuse can be practical, profitable and better for the planet.
By keeping doors, tiles and timber in circulation, urban mining projects preserve history, reduce waste and lower the embodied emissions of new construction. They remain a specialized approach today, but with incentives, smarter logistics and digital planning, reclaimed materials could play a far larger role in future building practice.