Why engineers must lead on reuse

In a recent article from The Structural Engineer, Director James Morgan speaks about the genesis of The Engineers Reuse Collective and explains how the organisation is building knowledge and helping engineers to advocate for greater reuse across the industry.

The climate emergency and biodiversity loss are defining challenges of our time. The built environment sits at the heart of the issue, with the UK industry alone generating around 62% of national waste. While a large proportion of building materials are diverted from landfill, it’s very rarely retained as high-value building components. Instead, most ‘recovered’ materials undergo energy intensive recycling or downcycling processes that often yield far lower-value products – e.g. crushing structural concrete to produce granular fill.

In order to create real change, we have to change the current model. We already have a huge stock of useful materials locked up in buildings all around us – we should be keeping these assets in use for as long as possible and, when buildings do reach the end of their life, prioritising the reuse of the components.

This is the essence of the reuse hierarchy: retain, repair, refurbish, retrofit, remodel and repurpose.

The Collective has grown into a genuinely collaborative community of engineers and practitioners, all working to push reuse further. What started as a handful of practices swapping ideas has become a place where knowledge is shared openly, challenges tackled collaboratively and people feel supported to try new approaches on their projects.

As a group, they try to overcome some of the most persistent barriers to reuse – including the assumption that reuse is inherently more expensive. In a lot of cases this perception stems not from actual cost but from percieved risk.

By sharing real project experience, discussing procurement routes and comparing technical approaches, members begin to build a clearer understanding to advocate for reuse on their projects.