Høje Taastrup's former town hall stood empty and ready for demolition after the municipality had built a new town hall. Instead, the site was to be used for new townhouses and apartments. But the housing developer that had taken over the site suddenly saw potential in the former town hall that made them change their plans.
"Walking around the building, we realized that it's built with good materials and flexibility has been thought into the building. So the architect asked: 'Why tear this down?' Ultimately, we agreed that we couldn't justify having a sustainability agenda while demolishing such a building," says René Brandt, CEO of Ikano Bolig.
Instead, they will convert the town hall into 200 apartments, and according to Ikano Bolig's own calculations, this will save approximately 7,500 tonnes of CO2 and 560 truckloads of construction waste.
Demolishing is the easy way out
The most sustainable square metres are the ones we don't build. Building materials account for up to 80% of CO2 emissions from new construction over the lifetime of a building. Therefore, we need to reduce material consumption by, for example, renovating and reusing our existing buildings rather than demolishing and building new ones. This is the opinion of Rune Andersen, Assistant Professor at DTU Sustain and a circular construction researcher who has mapped 120,000 demolitions in Denmark.
"Høje Taastrup town hall is a good example of how you can achieve extremely high CO2 savings by not demolishing," he says.
And it's not just builders, but also private individuals who need to get better at renovating, as 18% of all demolished square metres are single-family homes.
"In the past, people would add on if they needed more space, but now it's more common to tear down and build new. It's easy because you get a quote from a company that takes care of the demolition and builds a new house exactly as you want it, whereas if you build an extension, you have to do all the planning yourself and get an architect and tradesmen involved," says Rune Andersen.
