What’s stopping us from reusing materials?

在英国，我们每年要拆除5万座建筑，每座建筑都有大量的材料可以再利用，但是……我们没有再利用。重复利用是循环经济的关键原则之一，它比循环利用更有优势，因为重复利用当前形式的东西所需的能量远远少于分解、加工然后改造成可用的东西所需的能量。

Take steel, for example. Steel is manufactured in standard section sizes and standard grades that have changed very little over the last 50 years. So it would make sense that if you’re demolishing a building you should be able to remove steel sections with the intention of reusing them elsewhere. And yet we don’t. Recycle it? Yes, we do that a lot. But reuse? Not so much.

So what’s stopping us? Well, the Steel Construction Institute (SCI) and Cambridge University researched the barriers to steel reuse and found that a combination of issues makes the process much more difficult than it needs to be.

One of the main issues is certification. To meet the requirements of the Eurocodes, every steel section used in a building should have a steel test certificate. This certificate sets out the grade of the steel (based on testing), confirms that the dimensions are correct and provides traceability of the actual materials used. Without the certificate you could re-test to confirm the properties of the material, but you’d never be able to confirm where the steel originally came from.

But this seems like a problem we should be able to solve in 2021. We have centralised databases for everything else and we’ve all spent the last year learning how to use a QR code – so surely every piece of steel could be marked with a QR code that’s connected to a database of certificates?

太棒了，也许我们可以为未来的工程师解决这个问题，但是我们从已经存在的建筑中移除的钢铁怎么办?这些建筑要么从来没有任何证书，要么其测试证书早已遗失在地下室的橱柜中，甚至没有人知道它的存在。如果钢铁是1970年以后生产的，你准备进行一些相当广泛的测试，那么你可能仍然可以重复使用它。这不是一个简单的过程，但这是可能的，它在欧洲法典中有定义。

The availability of sections and difficulties storing steelwork are also often listed as issues with re-using steelwork, and yet both of these could be easily overcome. What if the engineering design was approached from the opposite direction? Instead of the engineer specifying the sizes of steelwork they require, the contractor defines the sections that they can get and then the engineer finds a way to make it work. Yes, it requires your engineer to be a bit more creative and it might affect your floor plan, but it’s not impossible. Storing steelwork is a bit more difficult, but potentially doesn’t require a huge amount more space than storing new steelwork. And if your engineer is prepared to design based on what’s available then the amount of time you need to store the steelwork should also be reduced.

也许最难克服的论点是，这是一种不常见的做法——这不是我们通常的做法。不,它不是。也许我们得再努力一点让它变得可行。但这并不意味着我们不应该尝试，这在英国也不是一种完全史无前例的工作方式。在第二次世界大战期间和之后，钢铁是定量配给的，因此，钢铁部分的再利用是非常普遍的。

So maybe what we’re really missing is the motivation.

气候活动人士和世界各国领导人本周齐聚一堂，讨论立即采取激烈行动减少排放，我们需要深入挖掘，为全球问题找到创造性的解决方案。可能会更难一点，可能需要更长的时间。但如果我们能找到一种有效重复利用材料的方法，那么从长期来看，能源和成本的节省将是巨大的。