Reclaimed brick and steel reuse on a demolition site

Reclaiming brick and structural steel from a demolition site is decided by two things: the mortar the bricks were laid in, and whether a fabricator will take responsibility for the steel. Everything else, the rhetoric about circular economy and the diagrams in the sustainability chapter, follows from those two practical questions. Get them answered before you write a reuse commitment into a planning submission, because a condition requiring something the site cannot deliver is a condition you will be applying to vary.

What can realistically be reclaimed

Start with an honest inventory rather than an aspiration. On a typical post-war commercial building the recoverable items in descending order of value are structural steel sections, external cladding panels where the fixings are accessible, internal doors and ironmongery, sanitaryware, raised floor tiles, brick where the mortar allows, roof slate and clay tile, and timber joists and rafters.

Concrete is different. Crushed concrete has a ready market as sub-base aggregate and that is genuine reuse, but it is a downcycle rather than component reuse, and it should be reported as such in the submission rather than dressed up.

The building's age does most of the work in setting expectations. A Victorian or Edwardian building laid in lime mortar and framed in timber is a reclaimer's site. A 1970s building in cement mortar with cast-in fixings and asbestos-containing materials is not, whatever the ambition of the client's sustainability policy.

Asbestos governs the sequence. A refurbishment and demolition survey under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 has to be complete before any reclamation planning is meaningful, because removal works will destroy some of what you hoped to recover.

Testing and certification of reused structural steel

This is the part that stops schemes, and it is a certification problem rather than an engineering one.

Structural steelwork placed on the market in the UK needs a declaration of performance under BS EN 1090-1, which in turn needs the material properties to be established. New steel arrives with mill certificates. Reclaimed steel arrives with nothing.

Three routes exist, and the fabricator chooses between them:

1. Testing to establish properties. Tensile tests to determine yield and ultimate strength, plus chemical analysis to establish weldability through the carbon equivalent value, on a sampling regime agreed with the fabricator's notified body. Steel from pre-1970 buildings often tests to grades comparable with modern S275.
2. Reuse under the existing documentation, where the original mill certificates or fabrication records survive and can be traced to specific sections. Rare, but it happens on buildings under thirty years old with good records.
3. Reuse in non-structural or lightly loaded applications where the declaration requirement does not bite, such as temporary works, guarding or secondary steelwork.

The Steel Construction Institute has published protocols for structural steel reuse that fabricators recognise, and naming the protocol you intend to follow in the submission is worth more than a percentage target. Steel portal frames from logistics buildings are among the better candidates, because the sections are long, repetitive and bolted rather than welded, a point that sits alongside the wider issues in our note on energy statements for warehouse and logistics schemes.

Bolted connections matter more than anything else. A welded frame cut into pieces is scrap. A bolted frame unbolted carefully is a kit.

Brick reclamation and the mortar question

Brick recovery is governed almost entirely by the mortar. Lime mortar is softer than the brick, so a brick struck from a lime-mortared wall tends to come away clean and whole. Cement mortar is often as strong as or stronger than the brick, so the failure surface runs through the brick rather than the joint and the recovery rate collapses.

The practical test is simple and costs almost nothing. Take down a square metre of the wall by hand early in the programme, count what survives intact, and use that figure rather than a published assumption. Do it in more than one location, because a building may have been extended in a different mortar.

Two further points affect whether reclaimed brick can be used in the new build. Frost resistance and soluble salt content of old brick vary, and a reclaimed brick that performed well in a sheltered internal wall may not suit an exposed parapet. And dimensional variation in pre-metric brick makes coursing with modern brick awkward, so plan to use reclaimed brick in discrete elements rather than mixed through a facade.

Where reclamation is not viable, say so and redirect the commitment. A reclaimed brick slip to a feature elevation, or sale of sound brick to a reclamation yard rather than crushing, are both defensible outcomes, and both belong in the Circular Economy Statement with the reasoning attached.

Storage and double handling on a constrained site

Reclamation needs space, and space is what an urban site does not have. Every reclaimed item has to be taken down, sorted, protected, stored and then either sold off site or lifted back into the works months later.

On a tight site that means either an off-site store, with the haulage and the carbon that implies, or a phasing arrangement that lets reclaimed material go straight back into the first phase of construction. The second option is much better and it needs the demolition and construction programmes drawn on the same bar chart at the design stage.

Double handling is where the carbon saving quietly disappears. Two lorry movements to a store 40 miles away and back can outweigh the embodied carbon avoided on a modest quantity of brick. Under the RICS Whole Life Carbon Assessment standard the transport and reprocessing impacts of reclaimed material are counted, so the arithmetic in a Whole Life Carbon Assessment will show this if the assessment is done honestly. Run that calculation before committing to the store.

Programme effect of careful deconstruction

Careful deconstruction takes longer than machine demolition, and pretending otherwise damages your credibility with the contractor and with the officer.

Hand take-down of brickwork, unbolting of steel frames and removal of fixtures without damage all add weeks. On a site with a fixed possession date or a pre-let, that time has a cost, and the honest way to present it is as a trade-off the client has chosen rather than a free gain.

Three things reduce the penalty. Sequence the reclamation so it runs in parallel with enabling works elsewhere on the site. Sell items off site during the take-down rather than after it, so the storage problem never arises. And limit the reclamation scope to items with a real destination, because material reclaimed with no buyer and no design use is stored waste.

Commitments a condition can secure

Councils are increasingly attaching conditions on demolition materials, and the wording determines whether the condition is deliverable.

Conditions that work are procedural. A pre-demolition audit submitted and approved before demolition starts, identifying materials and their intended destinations. A requirement that the audit's findings are reflected in the construction specification. A post-demolition record submitted within a stated period. A requirement to apply the waste hierarchy under regulation 12 of the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011, which is a legal duty in any event.

Conditions that fail are numerical targets fixed before the survey. A condition requiring 70 per cent of brick to be reclaimed, imposed on a cement-mortared building, cannot be complied with and cannot be enforced sensibly either. If an officer proposes one, offer the procedural version instead and explain why.

Remember the separate consents. Demolition needs a notice under section 80 of the Building Act 1984, certain demolition needs prior approval of the method and restoration under Part 11 of the General Permitted Development Order 2015, and relevant demolition in a conservation area needs planning permission in its own right, with unauthorised demolition being a criminal offence.

Recording the outcome after demolition

The Pre-redevelopment Audit is the document that starts this process, and the closing record is what proves it happened.

Record, per material stream, the estimated quantity from the audit, the quantity actually recovered, where it went, and the waste transfer or consignment note references. Where a stream fell short, give the reason. A record that admits a low brick recovery because the mortar tested harder than expected is more use to the next project, and more credible to the authority, than one that reports every target met.

Keep it alongside the Site Waste Management Plan records even though the 2008 regulations requiring those plans were revoked, because councils still condition them and the waste duty of care paperwork has to be retained regardless.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required, and the certification of reused structural steel is a matter for a fabricator and a structural engineer rather than a planning document.

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