Mark Anthony's Blog

Like its cousin the construction industry, the demolition sector has suffered from the slings and arrows of economic misfortune during the past 18 months. Demand has slowed and any work that has continued has been consistently “value engineered” to ensure that, when the dust settled, any meagre profits remained with the client or main contractor, not with the demolition crews.

Like construction, demolition has borne these cycles of boom and bust before (and will undoubtedly do so again); and as deep and prolonged as this latest trough might have been, there is now the faint whisper of recovery in the air. And following one particular high-profile public pronouncement, some demolition contractors are even allowing themselves to imagine another boom beckoning on the horizon.

What sets this possible upturn aside, however, is its root cause. While previous upward curves in the fortunes of the demolition industry could be traced back to the need for more – houses, office buildings, sports arenas – the next boom (if it happens) is likely to be a result of the need for less.

The UK Government’s chief construction adviser Paul Morrell has been charged with ridding the construction industry of its carbon emissions in order to meet ambitious targets to reduce the country’s overall carbon footprint by an ambitious 80 percent by 2050. And in a recent interview with The Times, he said that some of these reductions will require the demolition of swathes of city centre buildings erected in the 1960s and 70s.

Morrell, who took up his new post at the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills at the end of November last year, said: “In the Sixties, everything was built cheaper, faster and nastier. Although you can do some things to buildings from the Sixties and Seventies, like replacing the roofs, there are some places that need to come down entirely.” He said that problem areas were likely to be places such as Newcastle city centre, where a lot of buildings went up in the Sixties and Seventies. Other towns that could undergo an eco-makeover could include Slough and Aylesbury. “The buildings that pose the most difficulties are semi-industrialised, highly inefficient, badly insulated and so ugly that they are not worth refurbishing,” Morrell added.

According to the British Property Federation, property is responsible for 50 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions. The Government has a target for all new commercial buildings built from 2018 to be zero-carbon, but a strategy for how to deal with existing stock has yet to be established. Meanwhile, The Policy Exchange think-tank, has estimated that Britain would need to spend about £400 billion on new and refurbished infrastructure by 2020 to address historic underinvestment and to kick-start transition to a low-carbon economy.

All of which will be like music to the ears of the beleaguered demolition industry that has long since completed its work on the London 2012 Olympic development and has been scanning the horizon for the next impending upturn in fortune. However, while demolition contractors would unquestionably welcome such a large-scale city centre clearance campaign, the industry is more conscious than most of the potential environmental impact of the buildings erected to replace those demolished.

As an industry, demolition prides itself on its environmental credentials, and members of the National Federation of Demolition Contractors (NFDC) regularly achieve recycling levels of 95+ percent that put their construction cousins to shame. But while bricks, slates, timber and concrete have all been the source of additional revenue in the past, there is a growing concern that the construction industry’s continuing lack of foresight could lead to another environmental black hole in the not too distant future. “In older buildings, virtually everything can be recycled, reused or salvaged in some way,” says NFDC chief executive Howard Button. “But more modern buildings often contain materials that cannot be reclaimed or which are cross-contaminated to the point that they hold no commercial value and renders them non-recyclable.”

Of course, it would be nice to lay the blame for this problem at the door of naive architects of the past who were blissfully unaware of the environmental havoc that would be wrought by their profligate use of materials that were ultimately destined for landfill. But, according to Button, these policies remain today. “Architects are continuing to specify composite materials for buildings that are being erected now,” he asserts. “In 20 or 30 years time when that building is being demolished to make way for something else, those materials are going to one place - a large hole in the ground – with all the environmental issues associated with it.”

Button, along with other members of his industry, is convinced that the solution lies in an End of Life Directive, similar to that imposed upon car manufacturers, with reuse or recycling “designed in” long before a structure is built. “As an industry, we can only handle the materials that we find within the structures we’re demolishing. And while we have pioneered many innovative recycling and reuse systems and solutions, we are now working on buildings from the 1980s containing materials that simply cannot be reclaimed,” Button continues. “Ultimately, this will have a negative effect upon the environmental impact of what is ostensibly a very green industry sector. More worryingly, that is likely to mean a greater level of materials going to landfill and a growth in demand for increasingly scarce virgin materials.”

And that, according to Button, is the sting in the tail. While traditional construction materials can be readily processed and often reused on-site, processing or disposal of these more complex composite materials generally requires them to be transported off-site for handling and processing by specialist third-parties. “As soon as materials have to be hauled or transported, any carbon reductions made by the removal of an inefficient or poorly insulated building will be undermined by the carbon emissions of road transport and, in some cases, incineration of materials. As an environmentally-aware industry sector, we welcome any Government initiative that will lower carbon emissions and make the UK greener, particularly if it means more work for this sector,” Howard Button concludes. “But unless the UK Government insists that construction is planned with future demolition and dismantling in mind, we will all be exactly where we started 20 or 30 years from now.”