ABSTRACT
High-rise buildings consume a large amount of natural resources and energy in their construction. Designing for material recovery is also commonly referred to as ‘designing for deconstruction’ or ‘circular economy design’. Before try and design a building for material recovery, it is important to understand what is required to prevent materials being sent to landfill or contaminated. The type of recovery required is call ‘high-value recovery’. This means that the building will either be designed in such a way that allows materials to be efficiently removed without damage and directly reused or allow for contaminant-free material remanufacturing with minimal losses in material quality. ‘Stuff’ refers to all of the things that we put inside a building to make it habitable and useful. The design of services for high-value recovery can be implemented at two different levels: material selection and design of the service solutions themselves, and the way the services are deployed in the building.
