London opened the UK’s first circular construction hub in March. New York opened its first last week. And both needed the public sector to hand over a shed.
New York City’s Economic Development Corporation have launched a year-long pilot of what it calls a Circular Construction Hub, in a warehouse at MADE Bush Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The intention is for recovery, sorting, storage and redistribution of construction materials, and given construction and demolition debris accounts for 40% of New York’s total waste generation, there is real motivation.
But London got there first. On 2 March, the UK’s first circular construction hub opened in the Royal Docks. Tipping Point East sits on GLA land, delivered with Newham Council and a charity founded by Yes Make, RESOLVE Collective and Material Cultures.
Aside from who got there first, what’s interesting is that two of the most expensive cities on earth, working independently, have arrived at the same conclusion about material reuse. The missing piece (right now at least) is not an app, a standard, a pledge or another tax. It is somewhere to put the stuff.
Why this is the actual bottleneck
Reuse often dies on dates - it would be great if we got beyond this issue, but the fact is we are far from it. Materials come out of building A in March, building B wants some in October, building C in December and the rest has no certainty of ever finding a new home. Between those dates, and perhaps indefinitely, somebody has to own them, move them, store them, test them, insure them and warrant them. That’s working capital, logistics and liability/ownership problems on top of each other.
Rosemarie Miner (New York’s operator, Our Temenos) describes having a keen awareness of why salvage and surplus material use was not scaling, and turns that lens back on the supply chain. Anna Kelles (State Assemblymember) is pushing for deconstruction legislation in NYC, and I like her explanation that materials are valuable, the demand exists, and what is missing is the infrastructure to recover, sort, store and sell them so they are readily available and cost competitive.
Cost competitive is the phrase to underline.
The shed
In New York, the city owns the land and says it has a responsibility to use it to test what is possible at a larger scale. In London the hub sits on GLA land, with Innovate UK money used to fit out the site office from reclaimed materials.
These are pilots on public land, which is a perfectly respectable thing to be, but we should be honest about it. The scale is worth reading properly too - Tipping Point East’s impact is going to be a rounding error on a rounding error in terms of annual tonnes of construction waste. This is just the honest truth, but it doesn’t mean these pilots can’t shine a light on the value in what we too often consider as waste.
Ultimately…
The shed is better than another framework!
I’m keen to know what happens in NYC month thirteen. If the answer is that reuse hubs (currently) only stack up on free public land, that’s not a failure. But it makes this a strategic procurement decision rather than a market and we should treat it as one instead of waiting for a private operator who is not going to arrive in the short to medium term.
Steel is perhaps one of the easiest cases, which is a large part of why Circular Steel exists. It is valuable, traceable, standardised and testable. And even steel can get stuck on the same question.