Embedding circular materials article 2 of 3: This piece aims to equip architects with strategies and questions to increase circular materials usage in their projects. Authors: Melanie De Cola, AIA Director of Climate Action Pledge Programs, LEED Green Associate; Brad Guy, AIA, of Material Reuse LLC; and Rodolfo Perez, Ph.D. of IWBI, with special thanks to Shawn Wood of UGBC for his input on all things LEED v5. | All photos courtesy of Brad Guy.
Creating an action plan: The first step is to develop an action plan. ISO (ISO 59004) encodes six key principles for the establishment of an action plan towards circularity:
Systems thinking: consider the effects of your product on other elements, in the long term.
Value creation: what you produce should recover, retain or add value
Value sharing: create a network, not of a chain, of collaborating parties
Resource management: use less and close the loop
Resource tracking: data-drive your decisions
Ecosystem resilience: strive towards regeneration
General strategies
Select fewer higher-quality materials.
Reuse existing materials.
Find local re-use warehouses or other sources, e.g. decommissioned buildings.
Plan early for material re-use and adjust specs accordingly.
If working within an existing structure do an inventory first to assess re-usable materials. Create a materials passport and plan for storage of unused materials for other future projects.
Inspect existing materials for health and plan for remediation, stabilization, or safe disposal of contaminated materials.
Creation of a digital twin can help with material planning beforehand.
Incorporate principles of design for disassembly so anything installed can also be de-installed.
Embrace flexibility, an existing material may be re-used in a new way that was not what it was originally planned to fulfill.
Make sure the client is fully on-board with re-used materials and trusts the design team to select re-used materials.
Plan ahead and be clear about extra budget, or schedule, needed for careful deconstruction, recycling and/or storage of salvaged materials, or coordination of material pickup to and from reuse centers. If a clients is not on-board with certain aesthetic choices, is there time and budget to replace these items?
Set goals around aesthetic requirements or flexibility at the start to avoid material-by-material conflicts that take time to resolve. Be sure your team and building owners are comfortable with less-than-pristine outcomes.
Concept phase:
Do a material reuse assessment
Plan for deconstruction or renovation
Bring together key stakeholders for goal-setting and a materials workshop
Create an building LCA with reuse goals incorporated
Schematic design:
This phase is the inflection point to make or break circular material strategies and integration
Conduct a circularity and materials audit
Preliminary design
Assess the circularity audit
Identify low-carbon material alternatives
Evaluate availability of the selected materials palette
Create a digital twin if feasible
Create data collection methodology for material management and minimization of waste plan
Final design
Specify salvaged materials, coordinate logistics and storage with GC
Incorporate circular materials plan into procurement documents
Update LCA
Construction administration
Obtain EPDs from manufacturers
Create materials passports, maintenance plans and operating manuals for future owners and facilities managers
Questions to ask your project team:
What reclaimed materials are realistic for this project?
Who is responsible for finding them?
Who confirms quantity, quality, dimensions, and condition?
Who reserves, stores, protects, or processes them?
Who prices them, and at what point in design?
Who writes the specification and submittal requirements?
Who accepts warranty, liability, or performance risk?
Who installs the material?
Who documents the results?
Questions to ask your general contractor:
Have you deconstructed projects for reuse before?
Do you have experience selecting reused and salvaged materials?
Do you have existing relationships with reuse warehouses or salvaged material vendors?
Will workers be able to safely access and remove materials?
How can the assembly be designed to ensure this?
Do you have experience creating a deconstruction manual that will help future owners and workers?
Material banks and passports
Designing for adaptability and deconstruction: design new buildings to last in the face of change and when reaching end-of-first-life the materials and products lives will be extended.
Product as a Service (PaaS) model: These are essentially subscription models with services like maintenance, repair, and software built in. They can help extend the supplier or manufacturers’ financial and operational responsibility for their products and can also include lifecycle costs.
Digital Building Logbooks aka Building Passports: repository of information about a building for use throughout its lifecycle. These include BIMs, materials inventories, data on technical systems, utility records, and instructions for operation, maintenance, repair, and end-of-life scenarios.
Site considerations
Get to know the site and existing buildings, as the most circular building is the one that already exists. Language is powerful, reimagining existing buildings as places to ‘harvest’ instead of structures to be ‘demolished’ sets the tone for a new mindset, mimicking the example of other industries such as wastewater treatment facilities being reconceived as resource recovery plants. Professionals in the built environment must balance waste production with the safety of the reused products. Legacy substances such as lead paint as well as some plastic additives, coatings and solvents should not be given a second life in the built environment unless they can be safely stabilized and isolated from human exposure, even though we don’t have comprehensive means to transform them into usable products. Safe containment of toxic products may still be needed, hoping for technological advances that allow us to destroy certain substances.
Product considerations
What is it made of? If you know what is in it, it is more likely you can know what to do about it. Chemical disclosure documents such as HPDs or Declare labels (soon to be renamed Declare Health) can be used to scope the reusability of a material and confirm its safety
How is it installed? Can you easily remove it? How is it maintained to preserve functionality, durability and reusability? If possible, consider materials that are less reliant on adhesives and sealants
Pass over the information to the building management/operations. As in many of the challenges in construction, communication breakdowns and information loss can lead to derailing the goals set during design and construction. The client should be able to meet circularity goals during the life span of the building
Manufacturers’ programs and innovations: take-back programs have sprung off but ensure they are easily accessible by the building owners and users. Otherwise, they’d carry the same weight as a ‘recyclable’ claim. Expect regulated EPR-programs to grow, which should give more structure to take-back initiatives, but don’t rely on these and instead inquire with manufacturers. Guidance for the implementation of these principles is in ISO 59000 series (59004 for definitions, 59010 for business applications, 59020 for guidance on measuring). Product certifications and validated claims are useful to screen out materials for circularity. Of note, the Cradle 2 Cradle Products Institute just released a Circularity denomination. Manufacturers may have third party-verified claims of waste diversion, circularity, and/or reusability for their products.
State policies
Massachusetts, Vermont, West Virginia, Washington, D.C., and many local jurisdictions ban construction and demolition materials from landfills. This can help incentivize deconstruction, reuse, and recycling of building materials. The D.C. Green Construction Code has requirements and electives that include building reuse, materials reuse, and design for deconstruction. For more details see AIA’s Design for Adaptability, Deconstruction, & Reuse guide.
California Green Building Standards Code, CALGreen, requires at least 65% of construction and demolition debris to be diverted from most new construction projects. Effective July 1, 2024, CALGreen will limit embodied carbon emissions in the construction, remodel, or adaptive reuse of commercial buildings larger than 100,000 square feet and school projects over 50,000 square feet. The new code provides three paths to compliance: reuse at least 45% of an existing structure, employ materials that follow prescribed emission limits, or satisfy certain performance-based criteria in a whole building life cycle assessment demonstrating a minimum 10 percent reduction in global warming potential.
Maryland requires the sum of the recycled content and the salvaged material content will constitute a minimum of 10%, based on cost, of the total materials in the building project.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) has implemented landfill bans on a list of construction and demolition waste materials such as asphalt pavement, brick, concrete, metals, clean gypsum wallboard, and wood.
City and county policies
Cleveland and Cincinnati have offered 100% tax abatements for 10–15 years for new construction and existing building retrofits that are Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified. And San Francisco is one of many cities to charge waste fees by volume, and has managed to divert 80 percent of its waste from landfill.
New York City aims to reduce embodied carbon emissions for new buildings, infrastructure, and major retrofits by 50 percent (PlaNYC 2023). This will allow the City to move from a linear to a circular system, in which materials are not wasted and maximize the economic value of decisions made in both design and construction. Positioned between public and private industry, New York City Economic Development Corporation will facilitate demand and build capacity for circularity and embodied carbon reductions through procurement of contractors on capital projects. This supports NYC’s green economy vision to decarbonize buildings and construction by creating an embodied carbon strategy across their $9 billion portfolio. See NYC’s Clean and Circular: Design & Construction Guidelines for more information.
The City of Palo Alto enacted the Deconstruction & Construction Materials Management Ordinance, which requires deconstruction and prohibits demolition for residential and commercial projects where structures are being completely removed.
Los Angeles County is proposing to increase the minimum required C&D recycling rate from 50 percent to 70 percent; to require a 100 percent recycling rate for trees, stumps, rocks, and associated vegetation and soil from land clearing; and to require 100 percent of excavated soil for all projects be properly accounted for.
In San Francisco full building demolition projects are required to recycle or reuse a minimum of 75 percent of the discarded materials generated by the project.
Build Reuse www.buildreuse.org, working with partners across the reuse, design, LCA, and public-sector communities, is advancing work to make reclaimed materials more usable in mainstream projects. This includes national survey research on reclaimed and circular materials, implementation guidance for design and procurement teams, and the development of product documentation pathways such as life-cycle inventory data, life-cycle assessment, and Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) for reclaimed materials. From an in-depth review of 20 progressive C&D, deconstruction, salvage, and reuse policy examples across the United States, one pattern stands out: the most effective policies do not simply “require diversion.” They create a project workflow that makes reuse more likely. The examples do not form one uniform national model. Instead, they fall into several overlapping approaches:
Certified deconstruction contractor model Some jurisdictions emphasize who performs the work. These policies treat deconstruction as a skilled construction activity, not merely a demolition alternative. For architects, this reinforces the need to involve qualified deconstruction contractors before the demolition scope, schedule, and budget are fixed.
Salvage assessment or survey model Other jurisdictions require a salvage assessment, deconstruction survey, or similar review before a demolition permit or major removal activity proceeds. This is especially important for architects because it creates a formal opportunity to identify reusable materials during predesign, due diligence, schematic design, or early construction planning.
Diversion and documentation model Many policies require a waste management plan, diversion report, receipts, facility documentation, or final compliance report. These systems may be broader than reuse, but they still create a documentation framework that can support salvage, recycling, LEED documentation, owner reporting, case studies, and future carbon or EPD-related claims.
Reuse incentive or grant model Some communities do not mandate deconstruction but support it through grants, incentives, or reduced fees. These programs matter because they help address the cost and logistics gap between demolition and careful material recovery.
Circularity is one of mindfulMaterials Common Materials Framework’s (CMF) five action areas. The CMF is a system of structured data and language to report on materials’ attributes as required by the Materials Pledge. In its first release, the number of data points mapped in the CMF is now set to roughly 50 across the five action areas, which is set to expand as the CMF grows in adoption and better data practices are adopted across the industry. Out of these data points, the CMF has mapped the manufacturing location, the regenerative and renewable content, the provision of end-of-life guidance (and whether it’s provided on the physical product), the existence of take-back programs and whether the product diverts waste
LEED v5 introduces a new chapter of materials management – see article published last year that we put together about materials in v5. Projects can earn up to 18 possible points in the Materials and Resources credit (up from 13 in v4). Reuse is rewarded in every MR credit and can be leveraged across these credits for maximum points/impact. Building and materials reuse gets its own stand-alone credit.
MRc1: Building and Materials Reuse: This credit focuses on reuse of the structure and reuse of building materials. It helps reduce embodied carbon, keeps materials in circularity, reduces demand for virgin material sourcing, preserves resources and histories, and increases demand for reused materials. All in one credit!
Note that structure/enclosure materials procured from off-site sources can further contribute towards building reuse.
Similarly, for materials reuse, materials can either be retained on site or procured from off site. There is also a Salvage assessment req for projects with demo or deconstruction in their scope.
And in calculating building reuse, the materials reused from off-site are included in the numerator only. So, it’s kind of a bonus.
MRc2: Reduce Embodied Carbon: Demonstrating the embodied carbon benefits of reuse is currently limited by the lack of EPDs for salvaged materials, but v5 recognizes their significant impact on reducing embodied carbon and project teams can zero out the impacts of the manufacturing life-cycle states (A1-A3).
MRc3: Low-Emitting Materials: Products that are salvaged and reused and more than one year old will automatically comply with the VOC emission evaluation and do not require emissions evaluations.
MRc4: Building Product Selection and Procurement (BPSP): The Building Product Selection and Procurement or (BPSP) credit is a compilation of former credits under v4. Products that achieve two or more criteria areas are considered multi-attribute. Circular economy has its own criteria area for products within the BPSP matrix and we are evaluating programs and certification based on circular economy principles. Reused materials score the max score of 5 in the BPSP matrix.
MRc5: Construction and Demolition Waste Diversion: LEED v5 reinforces the waste hierarchy by weighting salvage/reuse diversion with a 2x multiplier, requiring a minimum level of source separation and/or reuse, and deemphasizing commingled recycling by capping recovery claims at 35% unless the recovery facility’s rates are third-party verified.
MRpc183: Design for Circularity pilot credit: The idea here is to incorporate and share circular design strategies achieved in the project (need at least 3 strategies – like design for adaptability, design for disassembly or material passports). And then for an additional point, projects can provide actual instructions on how to successfully disassemble the building in the future.
The next and final article will delve into two past COTE® Top Ten winning projects and their circular materials strategies as well as share numerous AIA and external resources for further learning.