Re-use of Building Products in the Netherlands

Abstract

This research departs from the desire to understand the practice of reuse of building products from a systemic standpoint, representing a network of multiple factors influencing the process of reusing. Through the Industrial Ecology theoretical framework, these relations are dynamic and contextually bounded defining the commercial feasibility of products. This holistic approach generates an overview of how dynamics in the building stock (housing stock as supply of potential reusable products) and socioeconomic, and technological factors, influence what is harvested for reuse in practice. The representation of these dynamic relations composes a conceptual model of the metabolism of building product reuse in the Netherlands. This “map” offers a way to improve the visualization and the understanding of how trajectories of flows of products are reused as well as the motivations, conditions and limitations behind them.