A consortium of European construction firms and organisations will develop a factory in London that repurposes used building materials, concrete in particular, at scale.
Conceived by Arup and Queen’s University Belfast, the €4m Horizon Europe-funded project, called NuBau Labs, aims to tackle both the carbon emitted from producing new materials and the huge waste created by demolition.
The team will develop its first pilot factory on the River Thames in East London.
NuBau Labs will step in only when options to retain, retrofit and reuse existing buildings are exhausted, and demolition is necessary.
At that point, NuBau Labs will salvage sections for high-value reuse rather than crushing or processing them into lower-value aggregate.
The factory will test, remanufacture and certify salvaged components for use in new buildings to encourage the mass reuse of construction materials.
Communities, designers, artists and engineers will be asked for ideas on how reused materials can create high-quality places that reflect local identity.
The name, NuBau Labs, is a nod to the New European Bauhaus initiative, an EU scheme promoting circular construction.
Model that can be replicated
“NuBau Labs represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about the materials already embedded in our cities, taking a systems-led approach to unlocking their value,” said Kerry Greeves, director and redevelopment specialist at Arup.
“Concrete is one of the more challenging materials to reuse at high value, making it an important focus for the project.
“By bringing together material recovery, testing, remanufacturing, engineering and low-carbon logistics, we want to demonstrate how reuse can become viable at much greater scale, creating a model that could ultimately be replicated across cities in Europe.”
Project leader Su Taylor, professor of structural engineering and head of the Intelligent and Sustainable Infrastructure Group at Queen’s University Belfast, said the aim is to see “yesterday’s concrete become tomorrow’s landmarks”.
She said the project will give salvaged concrete “a new life in beautiful compression structures, transforming how we design, build and value our resources for true circularity in construction”.
One of the first solutions to be demonstrated will be ReVault, an Arup-developed floor system that reuses reclaimed concrete to create new floors, representing a 70% reduction in embodied carbon compared with conventional floor systems.
