By extending the Urban Mining concept to old buildings that are ready for redevelopment, municipalities and developers can harvest local resources in a straightforward way and actively contribute to the green transition.
Bricks can be recycled, that’s for sure. When you knock down a brick wall made of lime mortar, the bricks can be reused; they can be CE marked, which is now approved and published to the whole EU, and they can be recycled in the next building.
When the opportunity for upcycling instead of downcycling is right at our feet and we just have to bend down and pick up the brick, of course we do.
The company Gamle Mursten has for a long time worked with projects where bricks from an existing building have been cleaned and returned CE marked when the next building is to be constructed.
Now this approach is taken a step further;
- Gamle Mursten assists with identifying resources and screening buildings before demolition
- Gamle Mursten performs pre-testing of the bricks at an approved laboratory, GM Tech, so the municipality/developer knows the quality
- Gamle Mursten cleans the bricks so they are ready for the next construction
- Gamle Mursten stores or assists with the creation of joint storage, so that several municipalities can draw from the same stock
- Gamle Mursten returns bricks that are CE approved to current standards for new construction
The novelty of this approach is that the company can offer storage or assist one or more municipalities in creating a joint warehouse, and the pallets of bricks become a resource bank for municipalities and developers to use for the next construction.
If it turns out that a municipality/developer has more bricks than are immediately needed within a short horizon, another municipality/developer can take over the bricks through the resource bank and so get the resources back into circulation.
In the past, such warehouses were managed by the Agency for Culture and Palaces for buildings worthy of preservation, but now the opportunity exists to take it to a new level, namely industrial production with large volume and capacity to serve the many projects that want sustainable building materials.
Gamle Mursten has raw materials available for production but at the same time avoids seeing the fine bricks disappear into the crusher or end up as filling, and the company contributes to a circular business with huge benefits for the environment, municipalities and private developers.
For many generations, Denmark has had an urban image with brick facades, supported by metaphors such as “the country is built of bricks”.
But what happens to the bricks that since the 1960s and until today have been mortared with cement mortar, and therefore do not separate because of the hard mortar? In these cases, it can be argued that the brickwork already became waste the day it was put up.
Bricks with cement mortar cannot be disassembled and the materials can only be downcycled and reused as filling. This means that all the fossil fuels and CO2 that were used, and are still used, for production are wasted and the bricks disappear from circulation.
Fortunately, you can still lay bricks with lime mortar, and there are many, many buildings around that are bricked with lime mortar and therefore do not have to become waste. In Denmark, according to the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, a minimum of 47 million bricks could be saved in Denmark if they were not degraded to basic material but were recycled at the highest possible level – as bricks.
2000 recycled bricks save 1 tonne of CO2 compared to firing new bricks.
