BioRegional – Rebuilding communities

Sustainability charity BioRegional is setting up a network of building material reuse centres to collect unwanted materials from construction sites and sell them on for reuse.

The ReIY - short for Reuse It Yourself - centres will be run as social enterprises, with income coming from large construction companies paying to have their waste materials collected, as well as from selling those materials on to trade customers and the general public. 

"The ReIY centres will save building contractors money as it will be cheaper to send waste to one of our centres than to send it to landfill," says Cara Whelan, ReIY Project Manager. "The centres will stock everything you'd expect to find at a buildings' merchant or DIY store, from bricks and tiles to timber and insulation materials."

Reducing landfill, reducing carbon emissions

The ReIY business model is based on a similar network of more than 500 building material reuse centres run by Habitat for Humanity in the USA. As well as reducing the amount of waste going to landfill, the ReIY centres will cut the amount of carbon emissions produced through the manufacturing of construction materials.

"Every manufactured item has an 'embodied carbon' value which describes the amount of carbon required to produce it and transport it to the user," explains Cara. "By encouraging the reuse of construction materials, we're reducing the need to manufacture new materials - and this leads to carbon savings. We'll be using the Bath University Inventory of Carbon and Energy, which lists embodied carbon values for a wide range of materials, to measure the carbon savings generated by our centres."

Creating a nationwide network

The first ReIY centre will open in Croydon in 2010 and the team has plans to set up two further centres in London by 2012. Each centre has the potential to reuse around 1,000 tonnes of product in a year and although the 'embodied carbon' value varies from material to material, this could equate to a saving of 500 tonnes of carbon a year.

Cara explains that the three London centres will act as pilot projects for a nationwide network of ReIY centres: "Our vision is for organisations in different parts of the country to adopt the approach by setting up and running their own centres. We'll be using what we learn through the London pilots to refine the business model and develop a set of tried-and-tested operating systems and practices, so that others can easily replicate the approach in their own areas."