Rotor Deconstruction is a cooperative that organises the reuse of construction materials. It dismantles, processes and trades salvaged building components. By doing so, it promotes and facilitates the adoption of reuse practices within the construction industry — an indispensable leverage to reduce waste production and lower the environmental impacts. It also contributes to preserving the heritage value embedded in building materials and elements, and fosters the creation of local jobs.
Cross-border/international
Belgium
France
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Netherlands
Region of Brussels Capital
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-09-17
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): RTRDC scrl Type of organisation: For-profit company First name of representative: Olivia Last name of representative: Noel Gender: Female Nationality: Belgium Function: President of the advisory board Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Avenue de Bale 3 Town: Evere Postal code: 1140 Country: Belgium Direct Tel:+32 465 89 66 41 E-mail:contact@rotordc.com Website:https://rotordc.com
Rotor Deconstruction (aka RotorDC) is a cooperative company active in the salvage and reuse of building materials and components.
Since its beginnings in December 2016, RotorDC has developed a wide range of skills to enable the reuse of contemporary building elements: dismantling techniques, logistical systems, remanufacturing installations and a shop where clients can purchase building elements with a low environmental impact and a high cultural value.
RotorDC specialises in transforming salvaged building materials into ready-to-be-reused components, as easy to install as new materials. To do so, it has developed innovative conditioning processes for specific building elements: repair and transformation of lighting equipment; a state of the art method for removing mortar from ceramic and cement tiles; reprocessing of high quality ‘urban’ wood; cleaning and preparing for reuse of furniture, building hardware and sanitary equipment; planning and organising of salvage operations in large and complicated buildings.
Today, RotorDC employs around 25 people, generates an annual turnover of 1,6 M€ and has diverted from waste several thousands of tonnes of reusable elements.
Reuse
Salvage
Circular economy
Building materials
Logistics
In Europe, the construction industry has a significant impact on the environment. Not only is it a big waste producer (301.5 millions of tonnes in 2020) but many environmental impacts (notably GHG emissions) also arise from the production of new materials. Reusing existing materials thus entails a double benefit: preventing the production of waste by lengthening the life-cycle of existing goods and avoiding the need to produce new materials.
In 2017, together with a Belgian research institute, RotorDC undertook a life cycle analysis comparing the environmental impact of salvaged ceramic tiles with new equivalents. The results were clear: the impact of reusing these tiles is about 6 times lower than that of using new ones. Although such analysis cannot be carried out for each and every material salvaged by RotorDC, it illustrates a global trend: reuse is a very effective way to lower the environmental impact of the building sector—and RotorDC’s core activities are a direct contribution to this objective.
RotorDC is also particularly attentive to keep the environmental impact of its activities as low as possible. The recent moving to a new place is exemplary of this: after 5 years of temporary occupation in a former chocolate factory, RotorDC was given the opportunity to relocate on a new plot with long term perspectives. A former office building from the 1980s was present on this site. Instead of tearing it down and developing a brand new building (the Brussels ‘by default’ option), RotorDC decided instead to retrofit the existing infrastructures to host its activities. Additional storage spaces were built by using mostly salvaged components.
This attention to sustainability also concerns shipment politics (by bike for some products, no long distance shipment), acquisition strategies (no involvement in demolition projects before they obtain the proper permits), and conditioning of materials (use of eco-friendly products), etc.
Salvaging building materials and components is intrinsically a cultural issue. It is a way to acknowledge the value embedded in the built environment when it undergoes transformations. When a building as a whole can not meet its purpose anymore and has to be adapted (including partial demolitions), its constitutive elements can still serve a purpose if they are properly salvaged.
Throughout history, materials with a high symbolic value have always been salvaged for reuse. Today, architectural antiques and building materials from listed buildings are usually preserved and/or reused because most people acknowledge that they are part of a collective heritage. Through its practice, RotorDC advocates to extend this definition of ‘collective heritage’ to include a wider range of building elements. More mundane and recent materials are no less bearer of specific narratives and stories. They also reveal facets of our collective history. They also require care. They are also worth salvaging.
For many materials, a significant part of the preparation process at RotorDC consists in documenting their origin, their production process and their history, as a way to enhance their chance to find a new use. To do so, RotorDC has to regularly dig into archives of designers and manufacturers, trace back the origin of some constructive systems, and reveal how materials can be eloquent witnesses of modernity. If RotorDC’s showroom is first and foremost a shop, it is also an ever-evolving exhibition and a laboratory that invites visitors to question their default sense of aesthetics in the lens of sustainability.
RotorDC is proud to have supplied the elements for many housing, retail stores, restaurants, and bars in Brussels and around, thanks to durable partnerships with some designers and architects. They find at RotorDC a source of inspiring materials for their projects.
RotorDC is organised as a cooperative company. The shareholders are all current and former workers who take (or took) part in the activities of the company. The shares are emitted based on the amount of time spent by the workers in the company. Each shareholder has an equal voice in the general assembly, whatever the amount of shares they own, so that strategic orientations remain vested to the interest of the people who work at the company.
In the daily implementation of its activities, RotorDC has progressively established an organisation chart that helps setting the tasks for everyone. The model relies on a soft hierarchy, where decisions are made in participation and on the basis of a shared agenda. Consequently, the gap between the different levels of salary is kept as small as possible (less than 40% difference between the highest and the lowest salary). The company is constantly evolving, hence the organisation chart is not set in stone and its evolution is a collective concern.
In terms of supply and pricing, RotorDC seeks to achieve the best balance possible between making qualitative materials affordable to the many and valorising the work of the people involved in the salvage operations in a fair way. Many materials supplied by RotorDC are cheaper than new for the same quality, for instance insulation materials that help combat energy poverty. Some materials are equally expensive as new, but come with a great story, a deep patina or simply a clear conscience (notably because of their much lower environmental impact). Occasionally, RotorDC does offer for sale pieces that were conceived by renowned designers, or created by skilled craftsmen, or made using technologies now out of reach. These pieces are priced a bit higher, but it is RotorDC’s hope that the economies made with the more generic materials help bring them in reach of the many.
RotorDC was the first salvage dealer to open up in Brussels since the 1970s. Before that, people who were looking for a batch of salvaged materials or for a destination for the materials they had to get rid of on their site were obliged to travel at least 30 km away from the city, only to find a quite limited offer. Most of the time, this dissuaded them from making this extra effort, especially for relatively small quantities of materials.
The launch of RotorDC in Brussels helped to bring a reuse centre closer to where most demolition and renovation sites actually happen.
Since its creation, RotorDC has aimed to target both professionals and private customers. Since 2020 and the Covid-19 crisis, the amount of private house owners among the clients has increased significantly. Many of them use the materials to renovate their own house or apartment. Their motivation for choosing salvaged materials are varied: ecological concerns, fair prices, cultural value, support to the local economy…
RotorDC has set up a scheme that allows citizens (and other organisations alike) to deposit materials that they salvaged from their own sites at RotorDC’s facilities. These are then conditioned and sold by RotorDC. The benefits of the sale are distributed between the original owners and RotorDC. In practice, many small private owners use RotorDC as a one-stop shop where they can exchange materials they don’t need anymore for other salvaged elements they will reuse in their renovation works.
Historically, RotorDC emanates from a Brussels non-profit organisation called Rotor, started in 2005 and still in operation today. Rotor (the non-profit) explores material flows in the economy in general and the question of reusing building materials in particular. A big milestone in its history, and a seminal point for the creation of RotorDC, was the Opalis project, started in 2011 and supported at that time by public funding from the Brussels Capital Region. Its aim was to get a better understanding and give more visibility to businesses active in the reclamation of building materials in Belgium (then in North-West Europe). The methodology drew on site visits to hundreds of companies, to better understand the materials and allied services they can provide. The results of these investigations are then published in an online, public directory (Opalis.eu).
Through this research, Rotor realised that despite the high level of professionalisation of the sector, many dealers are focusing on historic materials destined for the domestic rural market. Few were geared towards salvaging what comes out of large building compounds of the service sector, which then and now makes up the bulk of demolition waste in metropolitan areas like the Brussels Region. RotorDC grew out of the realisation that certain dots needed urgent connection.
In its daily implementation, RotorDC seeks to collaborate with contractors, non-profit organisations, other companies and public authorities. It aspires to become a central node in a regional ecosystem for large-scale reuse. RotorDC now also trades materials from several other suppliers such as demolition contractors and real estate companies.
Collaborators of RotorDC have participated in numerous courses and architecture studios in diverse universities (incl. TUDelft, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Columbia GSAPP, University of Ghent, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Architecture Association London, Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs…).
RotorDC’s activities are at a crossroads of many different disciplines and fields of knowledge:
*Architecture and design—interactions with architects and designers are ubiquitous in RotorDC’s work, from the salvage of building components to their actual reuse. RotorDC regularly assists architects and designers on how to reuse specific elements in their projects. RotorDC also assists with technical assessments in existing buildings.
*Construction—or rather ‘de-construction’... Dismantling materials in a way that does not alter their characteristics requires high skills and a good understanding of the original construction techniques. RotorDC has developed a solid expertise in this domain through numerous operations.
*Art, design and architecture history—RotorDC has set up an informal network of experts that can help identify specific historic building materials. For instance, the provenance of natural stones or the history of early modern building materials. In exchange, RotorDC is generous in providing information and documentation on the buildings to relevant academics.
*Economy—the business aspect of RotorDC is obviously central. Selling second hand products comes with challenges that require witty strategies. For instance, the supply of materials remains largely tributary to the type of demolition works taking place at a certain time, necessitating flexibility to ensure a stable offer to the customers.
*Logistic—a central aspect as well. Operating in the urban context has a lot of pros (notably the proximity with the supply and the demand) but it also comes with a major con: the difficulty to find spaces big and cheap enough to ensure the storage and conditioning of materials. Here again, innovative logistics solutions were needed to overcome these challenges, and RotorDC relied on existing experts to design its value chains.
RotorDC is operated by people from different training and professional backgrounds so as to cover these different aspects.
RotorDC’s main results so far can be summarised as follows:
- 25 people currently employed (corresponding to 19.3 FTE), as of December 2022.
- Annual turnover of 1,6 M€, and rapidly growing.
- Thousands tonnes of building materials and components salvaged for reuse, corresponding to as much waste prevented (a more accurate counter of tonnage is currently being implemented).
- A 14.000 m² site, with a showroom (3000 m²), storage spaces (1000 m²), workshops (500 m²), and additional spaces to host like-minded organisations (5000 m²).
- An online webshop visited by 8.000 persons/month.
- Well over 5000 transactions/year.
- …
Please find in annex:
- A selection of press clippings since 2017. While the first press coverage was mostly regional, RotorDC quickly caught the attention of international journalists (a.o from the Guardian, the Financial Time, Euronews...).
- A summary of RotorDC's main activities in pictures.
- A selection of projects which procured their materials from RotorDC. It illustrates the diversity and the quality of the designs that can be achieved with properly salvaged building elements (these project have not been designed by RotorDC).
- A selection of pictures to illustrate RotorDC's recent installation on its new site in Evere.
- Two flyers illustrating some services provided by RotorDC: deposit sales and cleaning of ceramic tiles.
- A link to the project website (presentation of the project + RotorDC's webshop).
- A link to the national register of Belgian companies where the financial reports up to 2021 can be consulted (2022 is under preparation).
In general, reusing building elements is still quite a marginal practice within mainstream construction practices. In this view, developing a business model based on this idea is already a strong innovation (even though the practice of reuse itself is attested as far as the records on construction history go—the 20th century, during which reuse practices started to decline, might well be an exception rather than the norm).
In the context of the reuse sector, RotorDC is innovative on at least four levels:
1) Focus on modern and contemporary materials (as opposed to a large segment of other reclamation dealers mostly focusing on antique elements).
2) Focus on salvage from large-scale buildings, representative of the metropolitan urban fabric (as opposed to smaller-scale buildings and domestic architecture).
3) Supplying reusable materials with a high degree of preparation, including cleaning and reconditioning schemes, to meet the requirements and constraints of professional building contractors (as opposed to materials that are sold ‘raw from dismantling’ and that rather target diyers and self-builders).
4) Location in an urban context, including for conditioning and sales installations (as opposed to most of the other reclamations dealers who are located in the countryside).
RotorDC’s development is a good example of learning by doing.
Initially, the project capitalised on the knowledge, the networks and the reputation accumulated by the non-profit organisation Rotor during its first years of existence. It is also built upon a few salvage pilot operations hosted within Rotor, which allowed RotorDC to establish the proof of concept of its business model.
When it became an autonomous company in Dec. 2016, RotorDC’s main drive of evolution was through trial and error. Solid feedback loops, completed with a strong vision and plenty of collective intelligence, made it possible to make strategic decisions and adapt the project’s trajectory depending on what worked well—and what didn’t.
For instance, the need to build sound expertise on specific materials quickly appeared as a key issue. To support the R&D processes it entailed, RotorDC’s applied to, and benefited from, different funding from the Brussels Capital region, mostly through the regional programme ‘Be.Circular’ (aiming at fostering a more circular economy). The last one in date (2022-23) was for the development and acquisition of a new type of machine to clean cement tiles from the remaining mortar traces. In this case, the public funding is match-funded with RotorDC’s own investments. For the rest, the economic development of RotorDC mostly relies on the income it generates through the sales of reusable materials.
Even though RotorDC intends to push forward research, innovation and development of new reuse practices, the 'prototyping' phase of the project can now be considered as being over. The installation of RotorDC to a long-term location is a strong symbol of this inflection point in the project trajectory.
RotorDC seeks to share most of its experience and learnings, notably through public lectures, articles, diverse publications and teaching. These last few years, many new reuse initiatives have popped up a bit everywhere in Europe who explicitly mention RotorDC as a source of inspiration (in the same way that the creation of RotorDC was inspired by the existence of other companies and organisations already active in the reuse field). This demonstrates that the model is replicable—and, indeed, more reuse actors are needed to enable a more genuine circular economy.
That being said, it must be noted that the running of such an activity is, almost by essence, very context-dependent. It necessitates a good understanding of the local dynamics and excellent connections with local actors. Building up trust with the local construction economy requires time and commitment. In this sense, RotorDC is not a model that could be easily copy-pasted as such. However, the general findings can be—and indeed are—taken over by like-minded actors who adapt and implement this know-how in their own context.
In the last two years Brussels has seen the creation of several other salvage businesses. These initiatives coming from traditional demolition firms, social economy companies and general contractors stand witness that RotorDC’s model is contagious. Our facilities receive visiting groups of architects, builders, students and policymakers at least once a week, helping the project to reach an international audience. RotorDC is the international reference on how to organise reuse of building materials at a large scale in an urban context.
A major challenge addressed by RotorDC is that of the contribution of the construction industry to climate change and other environmental damages. On one hand, most buildings from the 20th century require a lot of energy for their in-use phase. On the other, simply erasing and substituting them for new buildings with better energetic performance is not a solution either as it would result in a huge amount of demolition waste and major impacts on the environment arising from the production of new materials—not to speak about the loss of many cultural buildings and the radical alteration of the urban landscapes.
Reuse is one of the strategies that can help overcome this conundrum. If it goes hand in hand with the retaining of existing buildings, it could become a major contribution to the adaptation of the existing building stock to the new environmental and climatic conditions all the while minimising the flows of waste and new materials—and all the impacts they entail. In this sense, RotorDC can be seen as a front-runner of the truly circular economy, understood as a way to create prosperity through maintaining in circulation existing goods.
It is also an interesting strategy to question and reconsider our collective attachments to the built environment, and rethink architectural and design practices. By providing a sort of ‘creative constraint’ (i.e. working with what is available at a given time), it pushes the design process towards new ways of thinking and doing, more empathic to what is already there, more responsible in terms of use of resources and more attached to the needs of the commissioners. Last but not least, this work with the materials also entails a fascinating exploration of new aesthetic dimensions, in which the creativity of designers and architects is no longer geared towards creating something from scratch but instead oriented towards a playful, meaningful and useful agencement of existing elements.
