Photograph by Andrew Latreille of Latreille Architectural Photography

How Planned Disassembly Can Reshape Design

By Jay Fox

Within the high-performance building community, attention is shifting beyond operational efficiency to embodied carbon and the full life cycle of materials. More than just considering where our building materials come from, there is also a growing interest in where they eventually go.

This has long been the area of expertise of Brad Guy, AIA, an architect and principal of Material Reuse LLC. Guy has spent decades researching how to reduce waste in construction, particularly through the deconstruction of buildings rather than their demolition. As Guy recently noted on the PHA Live special event April 15th, “Demolition, on average, is about 90% of all the waste that we generate from the built environment. This makes perfect sense,” he continued. “You're not really trying to make waste when you create a building.”

The amount of waste is dumbfounding. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, construction and demolition (C&D) debris amounted to around 548 million tons in 2015 and accounted for more than twice the volume of all municipal solid waste combined (see Defining Construction and Demolition Debris below). As the below infographic shows, a significant amount was reused in some way, but 24% (132 million tons) still found its way to the landfill. That percentage did not change in 2018 (and actually increased to 144 million tons out of 600 million tons of C&D debris). Unfortunately, more recent data has not been published.

U.S. Construction & Demolition Debris Infographic
U.S. construction & demolition debris

Where does all that waste go?

C&D debris accounts for more than twice the volume of all municipal solid waste generated annually in the United States.
548 million tons generated in 2015
End destinations of C&D debris (2015)
Next use — aggregate~295M tons
54%
Landfill~132M tons
24%
Next use — manufactured products~110M tons
20%
Next use — fuel, compost & soil amendment~11M tons
Debris by source (2015)
44%
Roads & bridges
242 million tons
31%
Buildings
169 million tons
25%
Other
136 million tons
Building debris by material (2015)
Concrete88.4M tons
52%
Wood products37.6M tons
22%
Asphalt shingles13.5M tons
Drywall & plasters13.0M tons
Brick & clay tile12.1M tons
Steel4.5M tons
Source: U.S. EPA, Construction and Demolition Debris: Material-Specific Data

In contrast to demolition, deconstruction involves carefully dismantling buildings to recover valuable materials and to divert debris from landfills. Through deconstruction, building materials like framing lumber, bricks, fixtures, insulation, and even some mechanical equipment can be salvaged for reuse or recycling and inserted back into the supply chain. Deconstruction treats buildings that have reached the end of their lives as material banks waiting to be drawn upon. The salvaged materials can be resold, donated, reprocessed into new products, or stockpiled for future projects.

A Principled Alignment

Dismantling buildings and salvaging components that are still of value is not a new idea. It is a practice that has been around for millennia, especially in communities where resources are scarce or access to engineering knowledge has been lost. Within the context of industrialized construction, deconstruction has only recently entered mainstream policy and design conversations as the construction industry reckons with its outsized contribution to waste and global emissions.

As the high-performance building movement has become increasingly concerned with embodied carbon (in addition to operational carbon), interest in deconstruction has predictably grown, as it is less a novel idea than a logical extension of principles many within the community already hold. If you have spent years optimizing a building’s thermal envelope to minimize energy demand over a fifty- or seventy-year service life, it is a short conceptual step to ask what happens to that envelope when the building eventually reaches the end of its useful life. It also directly addresses the embodied carbon locked inside the built environment.

Regenerative design pushes this logic further still, framing buildings not as static objects but as participants in material cycles. A structure built with mass timber or wood fiber insulation, for instance, stores atmospheric carbon for as long as those materials remain in service. If those materials can be deconstructed and redeployed in a second building rather than chipped or landfilled, the carbon stays sequestered and the demand for virgin resources drops. Whole-building life-cycle assessment (LCA), already standard in Living Building Challenge and increasingly common in Phius CORE and Passive House Institute-certified projects, makes this math explicit: the longer materials circulate at high value, the lower the building’s cradle-to-grave environmental impact.

As a result, many members of the Passive House community are now invested in finding how these materials can be repurposed after initial use.

Get Articles Like This Delivered to Your Inbox

Some Disassembly Required

As Guy notes, "A butcher doesn't look at a cow and look at only steaks. They look at every part of the cow, and they're going to cut that cow up to get the most out of it.” Continuing with this analogy, Guy explains that the goal for a project manager during a disassembly is not to simply pull out all the high-value items and materials, but to find ways to divvy up the entire building and get the most out of it.

This is where the practical challenges to deconstruction enter the picture.

Challenge number one is that most buildings are designed for permanence; their deconstruction was never part of their design. Adhesives, composite fasteners, and structural connections that were engineered for one-directional loading all resist clean separation. To make matters more difficult, hazardous materials like asbestos and lead paint can add layers of regulatory complexity and cost to any disassembly project. Dealing with spray foams is yet another all-too-common headache.

Even in the best of scenarios, deconstruction is never easy when confronting a building that was not designed for it, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to go about efficiently breaking one down. This has a significant impact on labor costs. After all, a wrecking crew with an excavator can level a wood-frame house in a day, but a deconstruction crew doing careful hand disassembly may need a week or more to finish the job. The salvaged materials must then be de-nailed, sorted, graded, stored, and marketed. Each of these steps adds cost and logistical overhead.

The math simply does not pencil out against the speed and low cost of mechanical demolition. As Guy says, it's hard for an owner or manager to break even and pay a person who is deconstructing a building by hand a living wage of $40 an hour.

Quality assurance is another hurdle. Salvaged dimensional lumber, for example, may carry hidden damage, old fastener holes, or inconsistent grading that makes structural engineers reluctant to specify it. Additionally, building codes and liability frameworks are largely silent on the reuse of structural salvage, which creates uncertainty for designers and builders alike provided they live in a region where there is a solid market for reclaimed materials.

Don't Go It Alone. Join Our Community.

The Reimagine Buildings Collective brings together building professionals stepping up to tackle climate change.

Join Reimagine Buildings Collective

Superstructural Support

These are not insurmountable challenges, but they evince why deconstruction needs social, legal, and regulatory support in order to thrive. Luckily, some cities are taking the initiative and creating policy in favor of deconstruction. Portland, Oregon, was an early mover, and since 2020 has required single-family homes and duplexes constructed before 1940 be deconstructed. San Antonio, Milwaukee, and around 20 other municipalities have followed with their own ordinances or incentive programs, according to Guy.

Meanwhile, designers are responding with specification strategies that anticipate end-of-life recovery. Some architects now include “deconstruction notes” in their drawing sets, identifying connections and sequencing that will simplify future disassembly. Material passports—which are similar to provenances for valuable artworks but instead catalog the composition, origin, and potential reuse pathways of every major component—have become more common and are no longer cost prohibitive due to advances in track and trace technologies. These digital fingerprints, which could be considered comparable to environmental product declarations (EPDs) in new materials, are gaining traction in European markets and in projects where whole-building LCA is a priority.

“It's hard to find a reclaimed material that has even equal impact to any new material, because you're not even making anything, you're just recovering it,” Guy says. For projects where minimizing environmental impact is a priority, this would seem to give reclaimed materials a leg up.

Rayan Ghazal, a member of the Reimagine Buildings Collective based in Fort Bragg, California, and Preservation Librarian - Emeritus - at Stanford University, notes that "a rating system that informs designers and the public of the 'deconstruction score' of a product, material, and application type" could potentially help teams obtain an even more granular understanding of their assemblies.

On the ground, the people doing the actual deconstructing are not only building expertise; they are also extending opportunities into disadvantaged communities. Social enterprises and workforce development programs have found that deconstruction offers an accessible entry point into the construction trades, providing meaningful work that requires careful craftsmanship and pays at a rate reserved for skilled work. Several local chapters for Habitat for Humanity (including Asheville) and independent organizations in cities like Baltimore and Detroit have built successful models that pair material salvage with job training for underemployed communities, creating a virtuous cycle of environmental and social benefit.

Located on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, the Treehouse uses screw piles for the foundation system with the addition of small concrete foundation walls as anchors. It helped with the difficult terrain and seriously reduced the amount of embodied carbon in the foundation system. Photo courtesy of KRJ Photos
Located on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, the Treehouse uses screw piles for the foundation system with the addition of small concrete foundation walls as anchors. It helped with the difficult terrain and seriously reduced the amount of embodied carbon in the foundation system. Photo courtesy of KRJ Photos
Read about the Treehouse

Technological and Design Support

Perhaps the most transformative shift is happening upstream, in how new buildings are conceived from the outset. Design for Deconstruction (DfD) asks architects and engineers to make end-of-life recovery a first-order design criterion, not an afterthought. “Designed for deconstruction is also designed for adaptability, and allowing buildings to extend their lives. And yes, at the very end, that we should be careful stewards of all the resources that we've embedded in buildings,” Guy says.

In practice, this means favoring mechanical fasteners over adhesives, bolted steel connections over welded ones, screwed sheathing over nailed, and modular or panelized assemblies that can be unbolted and transported intact. It means selecting bio-based materials that retain their performance characteristics through multiple service lives. Hempcrete, mycelium-based insulation, bio-based resins, and agricultural fiber panels are not only low-embodied-carbon alternatives; many are compostable or recyclable at end of life, sidestepping the separation challenges that plague petroleum-based products.

"Natural materials are what they are,” Guy adds. “The ingredients aren't mysterious."

Ryan Adanalian, another member of the Reimagine Buildings Collective and an experienced designer with a background in single-family residential projects and small commercial tenant improvements in Leadville, Colorado, agrees that trying to avoid using glues and relying instead on mechanical fasteners can go a long way when making buildings easier to deconstruct. He adds that prefabricated panel systems, curtain wall systems, and heavy timber framing with joinery connections that can be taken apart should also be considered as practical solutions by design teams.

Look Inside
To learn more about BIM, check out this study by BC Housing about the use of BIM during the planning and construction of Vienna House in Vancouver. Click on the photo of Vienna House (courtesy of Kindred Construction) to access the report. To read our article about Vienna House, click the link below.
To learn more about BIM, check out this study by BC Housing about the use of BIM during the planning and construction of Vienna House in Vancouver. Click on the photo of Vienna House (courtesy of Kindred Construction) to access the report. To read our article about Vienna House, click the link below.
Read about Vienna House

Additionally, innovative foundation systems like earth screws, stacking plumbing fixtures and in general reducing the size of plumbing runs, and having dedicated electrical chases are design strategies that can reduce material use. When paired with passive building strategies, the result is a building with fewer complex components to manage at disassembly and a dramatically lower operational carbon footprint during its service life.

Adanalian also notes that a DfD approach could be used to allow existing homes, particularly single-family dwellings, to expand or downsize as owners' needs change. "If a home is built with construction for de-construction in mind, you could start off with a small house and then remove a wall and add an addition when you are ready for a bigger place," he says. Rather than having a permanent footprint, a home could evolve with a family. Similar thinking could be applied to multifamily housing, where there is a skeleton structure connecting the units, but each of the units are designed so that they are largely interchangeable. "Folks can own their unit and move it to another location," provided the main structure is capable of accommodating the unit.

Building information modeling (BIM) also has a role to play in DfD. A well-developed BIM model is, in effect, a three-dimensional material passport for the entire building, recording not just geometry but material properties, fastener types, manufacturer data, and disassembly sequences. When enriched with deconstruction metadata, BIM transforms a building from an opaque assembly into a legible catalog of future resources. AI-assisted tools are beginning to augment this further, analyzing BIM models to flag design choices that would hinder disassembly, estimating salvage value, and optimizing deconstruction sequencing before a single wall panel is fabricated.

Looking Ahead

Deconstruction will not solve the construction industry’s waste problem overnight, but the trajectory is clear. As embodied carbon regulations tighten, as material costs rise, and as digital tools make it easier to track and recover building components, the economic and environmental logic of deconstruction will only strengthen. For the high-performance building community, the shift from demolition to deconstruction is less a revolution than a natural next step.

If you're interested in learning about deconstruction and reuse at an event, the annual Decon + Reuse Conference will take place this November in Phoenix, Arizona.
If you're interested in learning about deconstruction and reuse at an event, the annual Decon + Reuse Conference will take place this November in Phoenix, Arizona.
Learn more

One ever-present hurdle is costs and what is considered financially viable. However, both Adanalian and Ghazal see DfD as a potential means of reducing the total costs associated with owning a building, even if this isn't reflected in a building's upfront costs. (To call back to Terry Pratchett's famous "boots theory," a poor person will buy a pair of cheap boots for $20 that will last a year, while a wealthy person will buy a pair of well-made boots for $100 that last them a decade. At the end of the decade, the poor person will have spent $200 on boots, while the person who had the money to make the upfront payment will have spent $100.)

"I think this comes down to reframing what 'financially viable' means," Adanalian says. "I feel like this approach may be more expensive in the short term, but cheaper in the long run. Right now I am seeing the most expensive thing in construction is labor. In theory, the idea that a structure is able to be taken apart easily means it should be easily put together. Hopefully this saves time with maintenance and allows the owners to be able to do their own maintenance and repairs."

He adds, "What interests me most about the idea of construction for deconstruction is making the structure adaptable. It's going to be a structure that is adaptable and hopefully easy to work on." These structures can start small, focusing on single-family homes or even ADUs. "For this to be successful, I think it needs to be at a scale that does not require heavy or specialized equipment,” he continues. “I think things like beam spans should be scaled so that two people can carry them.”

"As Ryan noted, I think these systems can be built within a similar financial expenditure if they are designed appropriately and take the full measure of costs, including reduced labor and long-term maintenance costs," Ghazal says. "I think a clear line is needed in our approach: designing for deconstruction rather than accommodating systematically dysfunctional building methodologies into our ethos.

"I find the greatest challenge is that practitioners—designers and trades—are in default mode when it comes to current processes," Ghazal continues. Even small hurdles can derail a project. "Ironically, it is this same fickleness that can be used against the current default. Concentrating on projects that model these values and marketing the ideas beyond our technical world into the public and social media sphere can play a big role in making an impact."

Top photograph by Andrew Latreille of Latreille Architectural Photography

Defining Construction and Demolition Debris

Defining Construction and Demolition Debris

While it may detract from the larger point being made, it's important to parse what is meant by "construction and demolition debris." Many building science nerds are well acquainted with the phrase "it depends," as well as that phrase's parter in crime, "it's complicated." It's now time for the latter to have the limelight. It's also a reminder that the phrase is typically the last thing you see before diving down a rabbit hole for several hours, similar to how "Abandon all hope, ye who enter" (Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate) is said to hang above the entrance of hell.

According to the EPA, construction and demolition (C&D) debris may be generated from a variety of sources that involve construction, renovation, and demolition. Materials tracked by the EPA include concrete, steel, wood products, gypsum wallboard and plaster, brick and clay tile, asphalt shingles, and asphalt concrete (see Figure 1). Sources include not just buildings, but also roads and bridges, as well as "other."

Figure 1: Buildings — C&D debris by material (thousand tons)
Concrete Wood products Drywall & plasters Asphalt shingles Brick & clay tile Steel

To clarify, "the buildings category included residential and non-residential lodging, office, commercial, health care, educational, religious, public safety and amusement and recreation categories; roads include the highways and streets category; and other structures include the communication, power, transportation, sewer and waste disposal, water supply, conservation and development and manufacturing categories."

Delving deeper into the data reveals that far more concrete comes from roads and bridges and the "other" category (see Figures 2 and 3). In fact, roads and bridges did not produce any C&D debris besides concrete and asphalt concrete, while "other" only produced concrete and wood product debris.

Figure 2: Roads & bridges — C&D debris by material (thousand tons)
Concrete Asphalt concrete
Figure 3: Other sources — C&D debris by material (thousand tons)
Concrete Wood products

Meanwhile, as Figure 4 shows, roads and bridges has historically made up the largest share of C&D debris, well surpassing buildings and "other," and that 44% of C&D debris came from roads and bridges, 31% came from buildings, and 25% came from "other" in 2015 (see Figure 5).

Figure 4: Total C&D debris by source (thousand tons, 2012–2015)
Roads & bridges Buildings Other
Figure 5: Share of C&D debris by source (2015)

While all this doesn't detract from the point that we need to find ways to reuse building materials and divert resources away from the landfill, it's important to put the amount of C&D debris from buildings in perspective.

Source: U.S. EPA, Construction and Demolition Debris: Material-Specific Data

Learn More About Building for Deconstruction

Published: April 24, 2026
Author: Jay Fox
Categories: Article, Embodied Carbon, Natural Materials