Imagine you meet your new neighbour ...
Tom will soon be a father and is building a house for his family. You get on well together and you help him build a house now and then.
You set beams, doors and windows and watch as a house slowly takes shape. Shortly before Lea's birth, you share a beer under the freshly covered roof and let your thoughts wander...
What did it take to build this house?
What have once been fine lines on paper, soon became a tangible reality thanks to the treasures of our planet. You think of clay, quartz sand and trees that are now plaster, windows and beams.
This house consists of a love of detail ... and the limited resources of a unique planet.
A few years further and Lea comes of age ...
... and Tom is tearing it all down again. Only 18 years later, he doesn't bother to recover the materials. They end up in a landfill and are a burden for the planet instead of valuable to our lives – for which he pays by the container.
A bad deal? Yes.
Entirely fictional? For private building ladies and gentlemen ... admittedly, probably fictional. Surely, someone else will move in.
And in industrial construction?
Simply flattened everything
The Fortis Bank in Amsterdam has been a painful example of a life-threating trend: An ever shorter lifetime for our buildings.
The bank building was completed shortly before the turn of the millennium and torn down again in 20141, a whole 18 years from construction to demolition.
So far, raw materials have rarely been recovered from buildings and lose a great deal of their quality through demolition. Often they are downcycled as fill for road beds, but it's not rare for them to go straight to the landfill.
Once there, they only manage to deepen our harmful footprint on the surface of this planet.
Volunteers first: Who wants to give up their house to protect the environment?
Surely no one is willing to give up protective walls and fight storms at the breakfast table.
We want it to be cosy and warm at home, the wind mustn't blow the notes off the desk at work and the theater play in autumn would get quite wet without a roof.
An ever-growing number of people need a roof over their heads. We need houses to live in ... and yet we need a change in order to preserve our unique and fragile habitat.
An open letter to the construction industry
From construction waste to closed loops
Hey, I'm Stefan and I'm very worried about the world we're going to leave to our children.
We have seen unparalleled economic growth in recent decades. Whatever it produced, we immediately declared to be our new standard of living, causing enormous damage in the process. A linear economic paradigm created the modern world – and now threatens it.
As a top manager, I was part of the problem rather than part of the solution for a long time. I want to change that and invite the whole industry to help shape Bauwende now.
We need a healthy sense of urgency. Procastinating sustainable landmark decisions again and again to the next quarter does not create a world worth living in for the generations to come.
The clock is ticking ...
According to calculations by the Mercator Institute2, we have until 29 December 2027 to meet the 1.5 degree target3 in order to get atmospheric CO2-saturation under control.
