For some, the piles of used construction materials amassing on their property might have been considered a hoarding issue.
That wasn’t the case for Mat Boyle and Anna Winneke.
Among the dry and gnarly hills of Fryerstown, a central Victorian landscape ravaged by gold mining in the early years of European settlement, they were building a house from reclaimed materials.
Partly out of necessity — “there was really no budget other than our own energy,” Mr Boyle says — and partly out of principle.
“We’ve become such a throwaway world, and the stuff we’re throwing away is quite often awesome and better quality than what we’ve got now,” he says.
The house, built in the early 2000s over a number of years, contains beams they gleaned from a railway line and webbed trusses from a tech school. A grain silo became a bathroom.
Bricks, metal and timber were rescued from numerous demolished houses.
Ms Winneke estimates the cost of the build was less than $100,000, but that doesn’t include the cost of their own labour.
Mr Boyle had grown up among owner-built houses where “every little bit of material has got a story” and Ms Winneke had been to art school, working in sculpture and found objects.
For many years, they ran a construction business using reclaimed materials to build houses.
They were experts in bringing together the many rescued pieces.
“The main structure of a building is usually built around a few key elements,” Mr Boyle says.
“A lot of the stuff we’ve worked on in the past has got exposed roof trusses and beams, and they’re usually a set size, so that might determine the width of the building and the roof pitch.
“Quite often that’s a good starting point and then big feature things like openings, doors and windows and it’s trying to get that marriage between all the different elements … so it’s not just a hodgepodge.”
Eventually, the piles of construction materials they collected grew so large it couldn’t be ignored.
“People would come and ask, ‘Is that for sale?’ and before you knew it, we were trading,” Mr Boyle says.
The salvage yard
Today, Mr Boyle and Ms Winneke sell reclaimed building materials, diverting them from landfill in the process, across a lovingly curated 2.8-hectare site in Castlemaine.
They hope to inspire others to reduce construction waste by using materials they source mostly from buildings slated for demolition.
“What we’re constantly trying to do is impart our creative thinking on to other people that may not be able to see it or inherently value that resource,” Ms Winneke says.
The salvage yard
Today, Mr Boyle and Ms Winneke sell reclaimed building materials, diverting them from landfill in the process, across a lovingly curated 2.8-hectare site in Castlemaine.
They hope to inspire others to reduce construction waste by using materials they source mostly from buildings slated for demolition.
“What we’re constantly trying to do is impart our creative thinking on to other people that may not be able to see it or inherently value that resource,” Ms Winneke says.
However, customers who want to include reclaimed materials in their building project are often discouraged by builders or designers, she says.
“One of my greatest challenges is being able to empower people to be able to use the element that they want to use with the blockages from an industry that’s not open to it.”
However, customers who want to include reclaimed materials in their building project are often discouraged by builders or designers, she says.
“One of my greatest challenges is being able to empower people to be able to use the element that they want to use with the blockages from an industry that’s not open to it.”
“I think most people that come here are still doing it from an ethical stance more than their budget,” Mr Boyle says.
“But definitely there are people ringing up and saying, ‘How much is this and how much is that?’ And you know they’re comparing it to [a hardware store].”
After 25 years in the industry, Ms Winneke says attitudes towards reducing construction waste are getting worse, not better.
She attributes this to a lack of education among builders, a misconception that reclaimed materials are more costly to work with, and a dearth of regulations around building demolition.
More than one life cycle in mind
A 2023 report by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute found there had been limited consideration of circular economy principles in the Australian residential housing industry.
A circular economy (CE) means reducing waste by keeping existing materials in use for as long as possible and finding ways to reuse or recycle them into new products when they reach the end of their life span.
“It is difficult for building-industry stakeholders to economically justify disassembly and reuse,” the report states.
“Policy development should focus on incentivising disassembly for material reuse, as well as encouraging other ways to reduce embodied energy through material selection and the use of local products.
“Expanding the pool of people with a knowledge of CE is a high priority and requires developments in education, training and skills development.”
Architect and educator Tuba Kocaturk says reducing waste in Australia’s construction industry is key to achieving net zero carbon emissions.
“Around 18 to 20 per cent of emissions are generated by [the] construction sector, and about 40 per cent of the total landfill [in Australia] comes from construction waste,” says Professor Kocaturk, from Deakin University.
Working with reclaimed materials is only part of what’s needed to move to a circular economy in the construction industry, says Professor Kocaturk, who has researched best practice initiatives occurring overseas.
She says the first step involves “a mind shift from looking for opportunities to build new structures at every opportunity towards making use of most out of our existing building stock and that will involve retrofitting, repurposing and adaptive reuse of existing buildings”.
When new builds can’t be avoided, Professor Kocaturk says mainstream markets need to be established to track and trade reclaimed materials that could be incorporated into new construction.
She said to achieve a circular economy, buildings would also need to be designed for more than one life cycle.
“Imagine a building which is designed to be disassembled and dismantled so that its different materials and parts could be used in future constructions,” she says.
“In that regard, we can actually consider buildings as material banks.”
The recyclable house
In regional Victoria, one designer-builder has attempted to do just that.
As a child, Quentin Irvine couldn’t understand why recycling wasn’t for everything.
“Like why it was just for, you know, bottles and cans?” he says.
A decade ago, when he embarked on building his family home at Beaufort, he wanted it to be constructed from materials that could be recycled when the house reached the end of its life span.
Recycling, as opposed to reusing materials, he says, is where materials can be re-processed into the same or new products.
“Steel or aluminium goes back to being more stainless steel or aluminium … glass goes back to being sand or it goes back to being insulation or it goes back to being glass,” he says.
An electrical engineer who retrained as a designer and registered builder, Mr Irvine finds it challenging because so many common construction materials can’t be recycled.
He uses the example of the way some composite timber flooring, or some windows, contain glues and plastics making them difficult to recycle.
The use of glue can also contaminate and make materials difficult to dismantle without destroying, he says.
Mr Irvine says he used natural paint and compounds for plasterboard so that could be recycled “crushed and used as a fertiliser in farming operations because essentially plasterboard is recycled paper and lime”.
“Instead of using plastic liquid applied membranes for waterproofing, we use metal membranes and stainless steel.
“What we didn’t achieve was recyclable windows, for example. So there’s probably a good … 10 per cent of that building that’s not really recyclable.”
Mr Irvine has built a second home in Creswick, using the same recyclable ethos, and he is working on prototypes for high-thermal performance, fully recyclable doors and windows.
When working with clients, he says a lack of products designed for recyclability can be prohibitive because most people don’t factor in what happens to a house at the end of its life.
“People generally … think houses are going to last forever, and I’m here to bring the bad news that they’re not going to last,” he says.
