In January, Duncan Baker, Senior Lecturer, was featured in the Guardian’s article which discusses the current state of the construction industry which is creating huge CO2 emissions. What if new buildings had to be adapted and reused or built only with materials already available? The article discusses how mindsets are shifting.

While much of mainland Europe is well on the way to reimagining buildings as “urban mines” of potential, the UK is slowly beginning to catch up. Architect Duncan Baker-Brown, who published the Re-Use Atlas in 2017, says the subject has gone from being a niche pursuit to something being discussed at high level in the last year. He says:

“Since Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, the industry is starting to wake up. National legislation is still way behind, but a lot of local authorities are getting on with it anyway.”

He has been working with Brighton and Hove City Council to instil circular principles into the way local procurement works, and will be running an architectural summer school looking at how waste streams can be harvested from one of the council’s demolition sites and reused.

In addition, as part of the Futurebuild Steering Group, Duncan has helped form the 2020 knowledge programme for this international event in March, aimed at eliminating waste in the construction industry. Find out more about this event and Duncan’s contribution to the debate about making the transition to a zero carbon world by visiting the Futurebuild website.

We live in very interesting times that present many new and emerging challenges that seem to appear on a daily basis. The fact that humankind is having a profound impact on the natural world is not in question. However whether or not we can actually do something to change the negative impact we have on Planet Earth into a positive coexistence is a question that many people are considering but quite understandably quite difficult to solve.

The University of Brighton’s Responsible Futures WasteZone will help you navigate a route away from our current take, make, throw away society towards intelligent closed loop systems where waste is seen as food for either an organic natural ‘bio-sphere’ or the humanmade ‘tech-sphere’.

The WasteZone is a temporary place dedicated to the discussion of the issues & huge potentials of seeing waste as a valuable resource, not a problem. Come and hear talks by experts from worlds as diverse as resource management, cutting-edge design & architecture, politics, product and systems design, as well as a new generation of forward thinking suppliers, urban miners, up-cyclers, hackers and material bankers.

The WasteZone discussions will be supported by an inspirational exhibition of the products, materials and buildings, as well as new digital platforms and films, which are enabling an emergent circular economy and proving “that there is no such thing as waste, just stuff in the wrong place”.

The WasteZone is curated by architect, academic and environmental activist Duncan Baker-Brown famous for constructing Europe’s first permanent building constructed from over 90% material thrown away by others. Known as The Brighton Waste House this project inspired Baker-Brown to write a book published in 2017 entitled ‘The Re- Use Atlas: a designer’s guide towards a circular economy’. Many of the inspiring case studies from this book will be on display in The WasteZone.