Unlocking Urban Circularity: Scaling Material Reuse from Policy to Practice

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to communications@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

Unlocking Urban Circularity: Scaling Material Reuse from Policy to Pracice

CityTalk, June 26, 2025

Mary W. Rowe Hi everybody, it’s Mary Rowe from CityTalk. Glad to have you joining us here. We’re coming in from all parts of the country. Welcome to CityTalk, pleased to be able to do this one in June. What an interesting time we are living in. I always feel like I could start and say that every broadcast we do. But you know, we used to have this joke, “pictures at 11:00”, when things were happening so quickly, and so many interesting events and different kinds of circumstances that are affecting us. We appreciate people checking in on the chat, telling us where you’re coming from. Several hundred people will watch this live with us, and then lots of others will download it subsequently. I happen to be in Toronto today, but I’ve just come from Calgary and Edmonton, so hi, for those of you that I was just with in the middle of the country. Here we are back in Ontario, where it was hot, not so hot, but it’s still pretty humid here. CUI’s head office happens to be Toronto but we have staff working across the country, as all of you know. And Toronto happens to where I am today and that is home to many First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples and as many of you know, covered under the Williams Treaty and Treaty 13. Also, with the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Huron-Wendat, the Chippewa, and the Haudenosaunee. And we continue to live with the legacy of colonization. We … earlier this week, CUI, released a report called Sacred Places, Civic Assets, talking about what’s happening with institutions, buildings that were built by faith communities over, in some cases, centuries. And what their future needs to look like because they are facing all sorts of economic challenges and they just don’t have the volunteer capacity that they once had because people aren’t going to church the way they once did. And we’re saying these are civic assets. So, I’m going to ask the team to put that into the chat so you can download that report, because it’s all part of this evolving conversation about how the built environment evolves and how it changes. How it changes to reflect and respond to the needs of the people that live and depend on different aspects of it. And this session today on the circular economy is on circularity, particularly in the built environment, is so crucial for us to understand. It teaches us lots about how we actually tighten those feedback loops, create more reciprocal activity, which is what economies are, the way that energy and in this case materials, but in money and all the different forms, circulates, and circulates, and circulates if it’s enabled to do so, versus leaking out, versus being lost into other less productive use. And so I really appreciate the folks that are coming on this call today to just take us down a bit of a path, there will be many people in the chat that have experience in this and some of you may, this may be your first exposure to this notion of circularity and how it works in the built environment. But by all means, use the chat, put some questions in there, put some comments in there. We publish the chat, as you all know, so it’s a really valuable resource. We’ve done over 250 of these CityTalks since April of 2020, and they continue to be downloaded and referred to. We’re creating a kind of archive of what innovation and local problem-solving looks like on the ground. So I’m really appreciative to have all of you with us. I’m going to ask all our guests to put their cameras on for a minute so everybody can see who’s here. Let’s put y’all on and I’ll thank in advance our producers. This is our last CityTalk of the year, and you know, I live with this, that this is kind of the end of the year, but it’s not. And I don’t even have kids, but you know that thing where you kind of orient yourself that we’re just getting to the summer holiday, while we’re a little bit like that. We’re taking a break over the summer but we have many, many folks that are involved with us, so thank you for, I’ll thank the producers at the end of the show, but also just thanks gang for joining us in June when you’re probably ready to get planning to go to the camp or the cottage or your backyard or the park. Thanks for taking the time. So this is our gang, the assembled experts from coast to coast, bringing different perspectives on this. And I’m going to start with Carly. The rest of you can flip your cameras off. You’re going to come back; I’ll call you back. But let’s just start with Carly. We’ll put into the bio, into the chat who Carly is, but I just want to say how I got to Carly was through Lloyd Alter, who probably is on the chat. He’s probably in the audience, who writes a fabulous blog that I read regularly. And he’s, of course, the founder of Treehugger. He’s an architect and a city builder. And he is one of the early, early advocates for how we need to look at this material flow much differently. And so I then read about Carly and then wrote her and said, would you consider putting together a CityTalk? She very kindly said, yes. And has assembled this team to give us some input and some insight. So Carly, first of all, welcome to CityTalk. Great to have you.

Carly Connor Thanks for having me.

Mary W. Rowe I know you’re in Hamilton, so just tell us a little bit about your particular interest in this, how you got into it, what you do, what your sort of worldview is, and then I’ll bring the others on each and we’ll get their background and then we’ll have a kind of group chat about where this is all going. So over to you first.

Carly Connor Yeah, it’s a great segue, because a huge part of how I got here is Lloyd. So it’s key missing piece of this. So I’ll say hi, I’m Carly Connor. I’d say, I’m a building restoration engineer, and I’ve been a contractor before that. I deal with masonry, I deal with heritage buildings, and really, it is my role on the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals Board. As Anna’s chair of our advocacy committee, whose just sole focus is to look at existing buildings, kind of putting heritage to the side and say, we just look at existing buildings. But we have all of these engineers and professionals that are used to getting the maximum out of a building and then a maximum out the materials and assets. And we really started to look in the industry of how could we do this more efficiently? How can we look at adaptive reuse? What’s working, what’s not? And especially as soon as embodied carbon and circularity became words we didn’t have before, we suddenly could look at what we did in a different way, to say, really, we’re doing embodied carbon preservation. Really, we are sustainability professionals. But we have some standards and processes that we have within our sort of heritage existing building industry. What would that look like if we applied it outside of our little heritage bubble? Like, what could this be, this roadmap for embodied carbon preservation for existing buildings. And how could that relate to the embodied carbon policies of new construction in this overall roadmap, so you could look at a whole development of what’s in front of you, and what should stay and be redeveloped, and then maybe what should come down and build the new green thing but quantifying that impact of those materials, looking at the material preservation as well as the building preservation and that holistic sort of same bubble. So over the years, we were workshopping a whole bunch of different things from embodied carbon policy to circularity, and saying, how can we optimize these systems? I actually brought Lloyd in to say, like, are we crazy here? Like, give me your honest feedback. Like, this is how we kind of see blowing this all up in a really efficient way. And then he said we weren’t crazy. And it was sort of a now what? And a week later, Lloyd happened to be standing next to Ryan Zizzo from Mantle Developments, who was writing an Ontario Embodied Carbon Toolkit, and diving into circularity and diving into embodied carbon. And really, by kind of showing up in that conversation with Ryan, it was about adaptive reuse. And then it was circularity but understanding that roadmap. And so for a year, we really workshopped, I’d say global approaches to circularity, and embodied carbon, and existing buildings and said like, what would work here in Toronto? So I’m in Toronto. And we said like, what would here? How could it just naturally fit into our processes? Then from the heritage perspective, we said, here’s a whole bunch of this stuff that’s already there. We already reuse materials, and we do all of this internal project reuse. But what we’re missing is the system to get it across projects, and to get across the design ecosystem. It became very clear that was the missing part to make all of these be much more efficient. But as an engineer, we were reusing stuff, but if we didn’t need it on the project, all of a sudden it was waste. If we could have used it on the project and we needed to repair more things, we would have used but it was this, you started to see the waste creation, both of the sort of existing structure in front of you that you’re wasting, but then it also became like the leftovers in new construction, and like the waste from that perspective also became very clear, and as part of this whole conversation… And all of a sudden, we had the word circularity to talk to. We didn’t have that vernacular even like five years ago. And all of a sudden, it was, you know, all these other aspects of the construction world started caring about circularity, and we had this roadmap where we were doing it, but there were parts of the system that really didn’t work yet. And I’d say, which is sort of why I brought a whole bunch of the people on the call today, to share that historic experience and part of the system that they saw an opportunity to optimize, and only by a lot of the people on this call doing the core work across policy, and across sort of innovation, and across through the client side, does the puzzle really start to look different? But it’s really important of sort of seeing the system and understanding where you are in the system and say like, what’s actually the core problem here or how could we make something more efficient? But we really saw it’s about bringing silos together. But even I think Marcos, we were at a table at the circularity summit in Montreal with all of the municipalities. And everyone came down to like the core challenge with silos of how to really bring all of these groups together in order to effectively solve a problem and then say, now what? Like it has to be someone’s job to do something with this when we’re all kind of in these different siloed spheres, which is really what I saw, which made it say like, I think we can do this, but it needs to be someone’s job. So then I made it my job to do all of that and sort of get here today.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, I mean, this is an entrepreneurial understanding. And I always, when, you know, people come up and ask me questions about my career or whatever, because you know I’m of a certain nature that gets asked. And I always say, always find a way to say yes, you know. And it sounds like you did Carly, like you saw a bigger picture, you saw bunch of challenges, how could you actually say yes to creating a new kind of opportunity? I’ll just, I’m going to call next, I’m going to ask Xavier to put his camera on and we’re going to hear a little bit about him. But what’s interesting about the way you just laid that out, all the things, the challenges that you’re identifying around spotting the gaps, spotting, the waste, spotting ways in which the system, you know, they talk about in the economic world, they talk of plugging the leaks. How do you actually bring these resources back into the system? And it’s an interesting conversation for us to have in every domain, whether it’s a green building, whether it’s a mental health, whether it housing approaches, whether it economic development. These are all the same kind of thing, so I’m interested for the folks in the chat, just for us to start helping each other distill, what are the principles that we can learn here that are applicable to all aspects of community building and urban life, not just in terms of, so a circular economy is more than just this piece of it, but that’s why it’s so interesting to have this conversation. And I will just say off the bat, we’re seeing in the chat, there’s a comment about, we’re always challenged on CityTalk to see if we can make sure that we have as many diverse voices as we can have. And there are certain aspects of urban life that are not necessarily as engaged with diverse communities as it could be. And I would say that in the environmental sort of green side of it, that is an ongoing challenge particularly to make sure that we always want to up diversity. So I appreciate the critique in the chat about that, and we need to be thinking carefully about how we invite in other constituencies, other communities who are also active in this space. And in many ways, the themes of what you’re all discussing are rooted in a kind of Indigenous understanding of a holistic approach to these things. And so I appreciate that we’re always adding to our capacity to understand what does seven generations look like? What does stewardship look like, all that kind of thing. You were there Xavier, come back. Did we lose him? There he is. Come on back, Xavier. Put your camera on, your mic on. And, you know, as is often the case, I find with these topics, being an Ontario person primarily, when in doubt, look to Quebec. Like, what is going on in Quebec? What can we learn about this? And so please talk to us about your particular perspective. And Carly just mentioned that you met at a circularity conference, but, and that’s. A buzzword for a lot of us. We’re still trying to understand what you mean by that but talk to us about your particular perspective. Where are you? How did you get into this? What are you thinking about?

Xavier Brochu So, at Brick-Recyc, what we’re doing, what we’ve developed, is a technology to allow bricks to be, to remove the mortars from bricks during a deconstruction project, so that those bricks can be reused, either on the same project, on the same site, or be used on another project. So, we are actually commercializing our machine in the US, across Canada and in Europe. And in Montreal, we’ve built a whole ecosystem around our equipment. So we’re actually not only renting our machine, we are offering turnkey brick cleanup services. We are as well accepting bricks from sites where instead of sending them to landfill, we are taking, we are undergoing, we are cleaning them. And we are re-selecting them on the heritage brick market in Montreal and we have like a professional services to kind of tie all of that together where we are working with builders, we’re working with architects in the pre-project phase of their project to kind to help them plan their brick usual project. We do everything from explorationary openings on walls, to brick assessment, to brick quality assessments, to helping them on the specs, plan their project, cost, everything around that. So we are offering a full suite of products.

Mary W. Rowe Wow, that’s fantastic. What were you doing before, Xavier? How did you-

Xavier Brochu So I worked at the, I’ve been in the construction industry for about five years. I worked as a general contractor for four and a half of those years. Mostly I’m an institutional project. I am a industrial engineer by trade. So I started in the manufacturing space and moving to the construction industry, basically working on project management and applying some techniques from the manufacturing world to make construction projects more efficient. So from there, moving to a technology like Brick-Recyc, it’s kind of like the next step. It ties in together and making a project more efficient, but it has a big environmental component that was really, really important to me. Like using our technology, we’re able to reduce the carbon footprint of a masonry project by up to 80%. It’s what really really speaks to me, is as well, we are able to do it at a price that’s competitive and even in most cases cheaper than using new bricks, which means opening up whole new possibilities for projects and it can even be a way for our clients to reduce their project costs, and at the same time, reduce their carbon footprint and protect more heritage building, because instead of standing bricks to landfills, you are reusing them. So that’s pretty interesting, that allows us as well to even sell our machine to places in the U.S. Where our machine could work on dirty coal or even the nuclear energy right on site and they would still use it because it’s cheaper. Right, so that’s kind of how…

Mary W. Rowe It’s always a little depressing to me that, it’s just the reality, that doing the right thing, the only way we can get people to do the right things is when it becomes cheaper, you know, but this is the dilemma. And as we know, there are lots of traditional cultures that have been recycling, they don’t call it that, but reusing and been resourceful about adapting materials for different uses for generations. It’s just taken us all a while to catch up. I appreciate that. And you’re making a business of it.

Xavier Brochu Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely a business opportunity for us. And speaking of that, I think if we don’t work on bringing the cost of material, we use all down and kind of, with the goal of like making it competitive with traditional, let’s say, contraction methods, it’s going to stay a luxury product, right? Where it’s only going to be done either on institutional projects or with people that have like, that can afford to pay 5, 10% more for their base on your project.

Mary W. Rowe I mean, and that’s part of what we have to think about too, is how do we make this more, I always say, more regular? How does it just become an assumption that we all do it? I first got introduced to the notion of embodied carbon by a guy named Donald Ripkema. Somebody in the chat will know who I’m talking about, an American architect, I think, who said, and he kind of, this is many years ago, and it took me by surprise, it took a while to understand, that the greenest building is the one that’s already built. And that the concept of embodied carbon is not is still not on everybody’s radar, but but you’re there putting it into very, very practical use. I appreciate that, and you’re making a living out of it, which is tremendous. Let’s go to Isis now, we’re just sort of moving across the country and I … Don’t worry Natalie I’m going to … I’ll come back to Montreal but Isis, maybe you can come on and talk to us from your particular perspective, how do you interact with this whole discourse?

Isis Bennet Yeah, so I’m a structural engineer and I’m with WSP, and I am working on structural steel reuse. And this, we have our case study, I’m working on center block. So that is what we call our central parliament building. And so I’ve looked at how we need to incorporate the steel from a structural perspective. But now that it has been worked out for this project, we’re looking at how do we expand beyond one project? How do we integrate this across many projects, bring this to our clients who are interested in sustainability? And how does this become business as usual instead of this unique case?

Mary W. Rowe It’s interesting, Isis, this is an iconic project. I don’t know how many people have seen the scale of this project, I have. It’s staggering what the level of investment is, how much time it’s taking, and also just the level detail. But what’s important about it is it signals an important strategic use of public sector procurement.

Isis Bennet Yea, we definitely had a unique opportunity here. So for scale, for those who don’t know, it’s a huge building. On the reuse only, we’re looking at 1700 beams. So, for this to be our first local dive into steel reuse, having such a big quantity, we really had to work out every single detail. So we have some precedent. This isn’t the first time WSP is doing this. The UK has a head start, specifically with steel. So they worked out a lot of the kinks and we’re able to apply it here. And this project is special and unique because it’s one client, one building. But because the scale of the retrofit for the basement works, stretches the schedule so that we can take the beams out of this one building, take them away, inspect them, get them prepared to come back into the building and have that go full circle.

Mary W. Rowe No, listen, you keep going. What were you about to say?

Isis Bennet I was going to say, this is different than other projects where you maybe don’t have a source building or your timeline is so short, you’re doing a small renovation, you won’t have the time necessarily to do all that work and bring it back. So how do we manage that material flow?

Mary W. Rowe I mean, what’s so interesting is we’re trying to mainstream these practices. What does it take to mainstream? These practices, as we know, there’ve been pockets of experimentation, traditional, as I suggested, Indigenous communities have had these principles forever. And then maybe some small examples where someone starts to say, well, I can do this. I can model, I can operate this way. But when it starts to come into the public procurement and how centre block is being rebuilt. You have to just say to yourself, okay, maybe we’re making some serious progress here. So I just want everyone to know that I think this is a hopeful conversation. I know it’s easy to get impatient. Why did it take us so long? But we are seeing some advancement, some, we’re makin’ some progress, yeah?

Isis Bennet But this isn’t our first time in Ontario. So there’s a project in Toronto, the University of Toronto Scarborough campus. They bought some steel members from the ROM, the museum. So when that demo happened, part of a big retrofit, they just bought that off them, trucked it over to the other building and installed it. So it’s forming that connection. That’s the most challenging part. But it has been done.

Mary W. Rowe How do you get the transfer? How do, you know where the, I mean, we’ve had waste material exchange for a while, but then there’s a whole bunch of other factors here. Economics, efficiency, do you have the connections? Can you get this stuff? Do you have transportation infrastructure to be able to do it, harvest it, right? Logistics, good old logistics.

Isis Bennet Creating those connections and creating them early enough that we can make it all happen, get all the planning in place. So it’s totally doable, but it’s different than our normal procurement of steel. So establishing those connections early on, getting everyone talking on the same page, and then making sure that we are gearing our design to the available steel.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, great.

Isis Bennet And I think part of that when you’re transferring them, like material, from one person to another, you need to have a guarantee that it’s in good condition. So having some standardization in the industry.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, I, yeah. Oh, good old, the good old “S” word, standardization. Cause I think that’s the fear. I mean, we can see this in the food system, right? Where we’ve have food that would be for years, there’s probably food activists on the call, where we’ve has food that is technically no longer saleable, and traditionally was just going to be tossed in the garbage. Then we started to see different kinds of food brokers who got into the act and said, well, wait a second. I can actually package that differently, or I can get it into social service organizations that are doing food distribution. But again, it was the same principle. How do we actually look carefully at what we’re discarding? And how do we use it in a much…  Thread it back into the system, into a circular system? Isis, I’m delighted to have a structural engineer on CityTalk. You keep us in a built environment that stays up.

Isis Bennet It’s great to be here.

Mary W. Rowe Thank you for your service. Okay, let’s now go to Marcos, because he’s the other piece of the puzzle here about what the role of the regulator is or of a city government and how do you see, I mean, … You know, I’m kind of staggered by your job title alone, Marcos. So just describe to people what it is you’ve been doing in Richmond and how you guys have been approaching this. And then we will get to Natalie. Go ahead, Marcos.

Marcos Alejandro Badra Thank you for inviting me to be here. We in the city have the first strategy for circular economy that is connected with climate action. And we are working right now under the strategy to integrate and reduce symbolic carbon. And one of the strategies is to understand how we can use our demolition policy bylaw to increase the flow of material in the secondary material market. We started a few years ago to work with different stakeholders, and our understanding is that the system is not broken. The system is absolutely disconnected and working in silos. Carly made the comment earlier about that. We start to put different actors in the industry and start to map the flow of the materials in Richmond economy and understand why the materials are selected in that way, why they’re choosing that way, what is the expectation of the lifespan, and start to make more understanding around the material. We remove from our communication the word “waste”. Because if the material is waste, just send it to the landfill, no option. But if not waste, we need to rename to create a good perception in the community, because no one is willing to build the house or the infrastructure with waste. And our focus is to understand how we can recover or preserve the value of the materials and the resources that we have already in the economy. Working with all the actors, we started to also integrate concepts like the urban mining and the urban harvesting. It’s that you go to nature and no one is taking material from the nature without transformation. And we are planning to do exactly that way in the urban environment. You say, why? I need to invest technology, knowledge, and science on what we are doing and start from the least intervention as possible to reuse in the direct way, or how much I can transform this to be useful again and recover the value in the market. We are also integrating this with how we can reduce embodied carbon, preserve the embodied history of the materials, and create the value of the community for continuation. Because today the idea is to break down, do something new and it’s creating this connection with the previous history of the space. And people are losing the feeling of “I belong here”. When we can preserve the materials and connect with the story and go back through the flow in different aspects, and we start to connect different groups and putting down silos, that is working in different way. By now in the pilot projects that we are doing, that was a successful approach and we are growing step-by-step in this direction.

Mary W. Rowe You know, there’s this whole area of inquiry called material culture, which I, you know, I’m not that familiar with what it really means, but I’ll say what I think it means to me, which is that there’s a tactile visceral quality. I mean, I guess this would be at the heart of the work of the Urban Institute, and I’m assuming a lot of us who are on the chat, is that we believe that our physical environment affects our capacity to function and earn a living and it affects our experience of the world and our attachment to place. And so this idea that we would be really thoughtful, as you’re suggesting, and intentional to actually have a job title that says you’re the manager of the circular economy, that’s fundamentally a commitment that Richmond has made. And so it’s threading through all of your municipal conduct, right?

Marcos Alejandro Badra Yeah, and easy understanding also the circular economy know about just the material, but also how we can create economic opportunities, and also create social values and resiliency. More than ever, we need to understand how we can preserve the material locally. And that’s a strategical thing, to be less dependent from outside. And you can see all the-

Mary W. Rowe This is the discussion that the tariff thing put us suddenly into, is that we have to think about, wait a minute, how do we look at our own autonomy, our own self sustainability? It’s all part of the narrative.

Marcos Alejandro Badra And the knowledge behind that as well. People that are from different sectors sit together, plan together and understand together.

Mary W. Rowe They’ve got to know. I mean, that’s the notion of mapping. I think this is part of what we always, our colleagues at Shorefast are always saying, can we map, do you know your economy? Can you map your economy? And you’re saying, let’s map your materials. Let’s figure out where they’re coming from and going to. And there’s an interesting question for the chat that Matt’s offered. Matt, I’m going to deal with it when I get everybody on about, are there ways that we could create better documentation? Mark, let’s just look at the chat. You’ll see a question from Matt and we’ll come back and deal with, around when a building is being demolished, could there actually be an inventory of what are the materials that are, like an auction, I suppose, or whatever, that we can, you know, if you think of it, we can see this in clothing. Thrift was not always, well, thrift has always been a thing, but thrift is now a huge thing. And lots and lots of folks, I’m sure, on this call will tell us that they don’t buy anything new clothing-wise. They only thrift because they’re trying to, first of all, because they like what they can buy. But also, that it is keeping it out of the landfill. And it’s also making it a more stronger circular economy. Okay, Marcos, I’m going to come back to you. I’m going to ask Natalie to join us, our last person to get on. And Natalie, it’s great to see you. And I’m sure it’s been hot in Montreal too. Probably just, have you had a break from the heat now? It’s a little cooler there. You got a jacket on.

Natalie Voland I might change. It’s all good.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, yes, exactly. It can be, it cannot be. But talk to us about your particular, you know, introduction into this thing. And thanks everybody, continue to put stuff in the chat. So many great resources, great questions, book suggestions, whatever you’ve got, throw it into the chat. Okay, Natalie, come at us. Tell us what you’re about.

Natalie Voland Oh, okay, okay. No pressure. So just, I have a weird history. And by having a weird history, it allows me to do stuff that I don’t have to follow everybody else’s trajectory as far as traditional real estate developers. So, because I had no rules, I was able to just do stuff that I felt was aligned to my values. And I took some notes when the other speakers were speaking, so I could try to be concise about things that we could link together. So as an example, some building materials, as far as history, the fun fact is that we renovated a church so that we could do something different on it. But when we started to realize about the materials of the stonework that were outside, well, that made the facade of our buildings, it was actually workers that came to Montreal like in the late, well, late 1890s. They excavated the Lachine Canal, and it was through McGill University that we actually found out that they took the excavated stones from the Lachine Canal and built the church with it.

Mary W. Rowe How fabulous. And you found that out how?

Natalie Voland We had to write a historical document about what we needed to keep or not keep, that we were not actually planning to change the facade. We only started realizing that when we had to, like, put a door in, that it was four and a half feet wide, this situation of the door that was going through this brick, or stonework, excuse me. And I don’t know where we lost our way, because people do that and did that. You took something that was in one area and they put it into something else. I don’t know where we thought it was cool to…

Mary W. Rowe When did we lose that?

Natalie Voland  Like oh this is a new circular economy, I’m like, dudes this has been… I mean I don’t understand and at the same time… Okay, then I went into large industrial buildings and renovated those. And as we started bringing in new tenants, because it used to be like 60,000 square feet of like one floor, and then we started subdividing it up into smaller businesses. And then, you know, the next company would come in and be like, oh, you, know, here’s my architect, and they want us to rip the entire section down and rebuild. And I was like, why? You’re still building a conference room, a bathroom, like you know whatever, it makes no sense. So we started actually taking the interior wood structures of our walls. The building installation materials, because we were throwing it out. Well, I wasn’t, someone else was. And then two seconds later, a new truck would come with the same materials to build the new wall. And I was like, still haven’t figured out what to do with Jiprock yet, in case anybody else has figured that out. But we just kind of, when we, first of all, we don’t want to let people demolish for no reason. Inside, I’m talking about our buildings. And we have a very strict policy on how we could reuse the interiors of our buildings before we build new. And then when we do do that, the contractors are required to recuperate the material. And if we flip that now to new construction, now we’re building carbon neutral affordable housing because people told us we couldn’t. And I have a problem with things where you were saying like, you know, turn those yeses into something that is much more on a daily basis. So actually we’re working with Xavier on a project in a city called Saint Hyacinthe here in Quebec. And it’s the first time ever that I have to demolish some buildings to build new housing, just because the housing is just, it’s not in a good shape, whatever. So we’re actually working on doing exactly that. We’re creating an inventory of everything that we’re ripping down. We’re using stuff to move forward into the new building, but we’re also putting a lot of pressure on our architects and our engineers, specifically our structural engineers, in the new buildings to incorporate materials that have already been used somewhere else. And I think that’s really cool in one way of understanding is there’s a nonprofit organization in Montreal called Synergy. And they taught us something a long time ago, is that someone else’s waste is someone else’s opportunity. But, everyone’s talking about the good news, I just want to bring up for three seconds about why people don’t do this as far as the real estate developer. The major issue is logistics, right? How do I get it from one site to another? How do I make sure that I store it? Cause land costs me money, so I can’t just rip things apart. So in Saint Hyacinthe as an example, the city’s working with us to give us a lot that’s near there so we could store things so that as we move in our different large machinery to be able to excavate and stuff like that, that I don’t have to like pay twice to move the materials. Another issue is availability. If I build a much bigger building, then I only have a certain amount of bricks, as an example, to reuse in a section. And architects, especially builders, are not really happy about how to install these. Are they going to be there on time? I don’t have, you know, time is money. So what’s going to happen if the material isn’t there on time and you’re slowing me down and then I can’t deliver? The insurance companies who are like, wait a second, you just used a reused material. I need to have that documented. And I saw someone on the chat earlier, right? Can we put that as part of the demolition permit? We can do everything, but if we don’t do it quickly and efficiently, it’s going to cost more and then more people aren’t going to do that. And I remember a long time ago, finding a company who was recycling or reusing, repurposing, cause that’s the better word, these TV, you know, those old TVs, like old people used to use that had these big screens? So they took these screens and made like a tile from it and I was like, oh that’s super cool. It was a B Corp and I was, like, all right, this is really awesome. And it was $55 a square foot. So I don’t want this to be a luxury situation. I want it to be at business as usual. So I, don’t want to take up too much more time, but just to tell you, when you think circularly, a whole bunch of problems happen, but a whole lot of solutions happen. And to start with you saying, I’m going to do this, there is no other way, but we can’t make it more expensive because then we screw up with the affordability situation. So we just really want to be able to create that recipe and create more people like the people that are on this talk about how do we figure out what worked in one sector that could work in something else. So we’re certainly not perfect, but we’re trying to live imperfectly better each day.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, I mean, the great thing about this is that we’ve got people from the private sector, we’ve got people from the civil society, and we’ve got folks from municipal government. So it’s not everybody, as I suggested, but it’s a whole good mix. So let’s all put our cameras on. We always call this the bun fight. This is when we get to have a really interesting kind of open conversation, and I’m going to suggest you open your mic so that I don’t have to remind you every time when you’re still muted. So just open your mic, unless you got a barking dog, which nobody ever has. So many interesting things that are being surfaced in the chat here as well. Thanks gang, and chatters, thank you for all the comments you put in here and the books and the, great to see Mark Roseland. Mark, nice to see you on this call. And please put more resources here and lots of questions. And you can see when I ask that lots of people will. Because we’re building our kind of collective knowledge. I want to ask, also somebody has just said that June 23 was upcycling day. Who knew? So I didn’t know that. A couple of days ago, we had a day called upcycling day. But so again, if we could just share these resources with one another, apparently there’s some good maps that ECCC put up, so let’s see those. The other thing, as I saw a reference to 401 Richmond, I am pretty sure it was Margie Zeidler that introduced me to you Natalie, at the very beginning. Margie is the architect and owner, and Margie is a huge pioneer, huge figure in this world, an architect and a property owner who took the principles of circularity and adaptive reuse and all those things. And if you’ve never been to Toronto to go to 401 Richmond, go to 401 Richmond and you will see embodied, you will embodied carbon in action. How about that? So I was going to say that I want to chat a little bit about, there seems to me there are issues around rules. There’s issues around money. And then there’s probably issues around engaging design or professionals and designers. So let me start with rules and ask all of you, if there were a bylaw or a, particular kind of constraint or law that is in place now that you think should come off the books? Could be provincial, could be municipal, could federal. That would be… Or maybe we need a new rule. Do we need to pull some old rules off? Do we a new rules? Do you see in your purview, a game-changing rule? Who could take that? Is there one thing? Could be simple. Is there on thing, Carly? Is there thing?

Carly Connor Landfill capacity, cost of landfill. Someone’s paying for it. It’s subsidized, it’s real cheap.

Mary W. Rowe You want to make it more expensive to throw stuff away.

Carly Connor Only if it needs to go there. Like, if it needs to go to the landfill, if it’s inexpensive, it’s there. But if it really didn’t need to go there, it shouldn’t be there. Like someone subsidizing it, mostly like there’s brand new stuff that’s going in. So just like, how to look at this low hanging fruit that is just really easy to toss it out. But can we kind of build that system back? And I’d say that on the flip side, we put in in the chat kind of our approach to the Ontario Embodied Carbon Toolkit was that the rules that could exist to just add to what we have, to help just make more informed decisions, or grab this information and put it in people’s faces just to understand the waste. But it all comes down to logistics. If the material doesn’t have anywhere else to go then it needs to go to landfill. So none of those things matter until that logistic system is in place.

Mary W. Rowe But you’re saying should be last resort and should be… Could it be made prohibitively expensive so that would force it to be repurposed. Just an anecdote which, you know, call me, I’m complicit in this. If you, during covid became a consumer with your family of a lot of takeout food, you know, the municipal solid waste stream since covid has done this because of take-out containers. It’s just shocking. And so, the question is going to be, how do we make that prohibitively expensive so that you take your own container to that store, you know, or whatever. Rules, any other rules if yoy had a magic wand. What rule would you get rid of what rule would you create? Go ahead Marcos.

Marcos Alejandro Badra Well, I think what Carly was saying, the taxation system today is not helping because you are paying, again, the taxes on the material that you are recovering, and it’s not incentivizing the market to adopt these new materials in new processes. And it’s a double taxation.

Mary W. Rowe So what would you do, you do something at HST, you do something in the provincial sales tax, you look at…

Marcos Alejandro Badra Well, taxes are in the federal government regulation, but we should be working with them as well to understand how this whole flow can be, I don’t say no taxes, but a different system of taxes that kind of stimulate the market to naturally start to see in these materials a new way to create profit or new revenue and keep the economy working the healthy way. Today is very unclear and is very dependable on charities, companies recover the money, and that’s not something that is stimulating the sectors of different industries to absorb these new materials.

Mary W. Rowe Kind of crazy.

Natalie Voland Can I go a different way, and I feel like we’re always talking about taxes and penalties and all that stuff. And it’s 30% more for people to build today than it was a couple of years ago. So we have like a major issue with a housing crisis. And I always say we have a major problem with affordable housing because there is housing, it’s just not enough affordable housing. And a lot of the housing is not actually built properly because it is still built with like easiest, cheapest, and quickest. But it should go a different way. And you did mention, Marcos, something about incentivization. So if I’m doing this really cool stuff about potentially reusing whatever, I should get my building permit faster. I should pay less taxes on my permits, and I should be incentivized to potentially build an additional floor, as an example, so that I can actually change the market. I always say that real estate is, or I’m going to say investment in real estate is liquid. So if one city becomes too prohibitory to build, the developers will go somewhere else. And that situation doesn’t change on a systemic problem. So unless we build, like make a rule for absolutely everybody across Canada, which may or may not take several years to implement, and maybe that rule is crappy, and maybe that rule should be changed quicker and it doesn’t because our rule-making doesn’t go as fast as we should. So we should be actually highlighting other people and be like, okay, it costs me X amount of money more because I’m documenting all this stuff. So how do I recoup this? Well, I could recoup it by having a tax break or not paying a same permit fee or something. So I feel like, before we put that stick in the way, we need to go a different way and incentivize people to be the early adopters. Maybe that’s just because it benefits me, but, to be transparent…

Mary W. Rowe No that’s okay. We’re trying to make this to benefit everyone’s self-interest, so that’s part of what I’m asking about rules. How do we create those incentives and carrots? And maybe it’s a blend. Isis, any thoughts from you about particular rules or regulation? Go for it.

Isis Bennet I’m no policymaker, but if there was a rule I could put in, it would be mandating a pre-demolition audit. So Natalie had mentioned doing an inventory before doing demo or any work. Once we know what is available and what quantities, that’ll allow us to really gear industry towards the waste stream. So if there’s an incentive that forced people to do the audit, we would understand the industry a lot better.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, and one of the incentives would be if there was a financial incentive. I think what Natalie is saying is, if you could make it more profitable to do the right thing. That’s one question.

Natalie Voland How about not profitable, just less costly?

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, okay, okay. Whatever, give me the language, Nat, whatever it is, less cost, a way to save money. I mean, because that is the other piece that you raised, Natalie, at the beginning is, and I think it’s coming up in the chat too. We are at a time where affordability is a crisis. Where that is being promoted at the public policy level. They want things that increase affordability. How do we fit this whole domain into making life more affordable? Go ahead, Isis, and then I’ll go to Xavier. Go ahead, Isis.

Isis Bennet I was going to touch on the cost, because when you’re reclaiming something, if you’re getting it at scrap, current scrap prices, that’s a very low price for structural elements, for steel. So there is this buffer between what you’re buying scrap elements at versus what new steel and other materials cost. So you have this buffer. And if you can figure out cost analysis for reusing this material, and you can fit within that, you might be able to come out cost parity, if you’re lucky. Maybe a little better than that but obviously every project is unique …

Natalie Voland And do you have an engineer that is willing to sign off on material that they don’t know anything about?

Isis Bennet So we need documentation, we need thorough documentation.

Mary W. Rowe You need documentation so that public safety is maintained, so that that structural engineer doesn’t feel their stamp is in jeopardy when they actually sign off on something. What were you going to say, Xavier?

Xavier Brochu So well, and it’s something to kind of add to this point. So you mentioned that the people are trying to see what’s happening in Quebec to kind of get ideas for the rest of Canada. In Quebec, we have the tendency to turn to Europe. And what we’re seeing in France and the rest of Europe would really, really push builders and clients to go toward the brick re-usel road. Because right now Europe is probably going to be our best market for our machine in the next probably six months, it’s going to overtake all the rest of our revenue in the rest in the world. It’s basically, those pre-demolition material audits that are more and more being mandated depending on the size of the project in certain countries, and really, really cost of material disposal. These two things right now, even before our machine created a big brick, let’s say brick clean up industry and brick re-use industry. And when we’re… With our machine, it’s just, it’s about giving them a more efficient way to clean and re-use their bricks, rather than convincing them to clean and re-use their bricks. So all that, what those regulations made is really create a favourable environment or a material re-usel there. But on the other side, on the cost side that Natalie mentioned, the actual, let’s say, regular linear construction methods have had like a hundred years for supply chain to industrialize, get hyper-efficient. You should look at like brick, not the brick business, but like brick factories in the US, they’re mostly now operated by robots. And then can make brick …

Mary W. Rowe I was wondering about that. Where’s AI in this? Yeah, yeah …

Xavier Brochu It’s super, super efficient. And I’m, again, I’m an industrial engineer, so I know what it can look like. But it’s been 100 years in the making. So at the beginning, there has to be incentives to encourage builders, developers, as well as institutional clients to kind of get started and do those first projects so that there is a reason to do them and there’s an ecosystem that can build around those projects, right, and give a chance to businesses like ours, but there’s tons of them in Montreal and across Canada, to kind of give them a chance, to get their roots, build their logistical chains and all of that, because if I could… If I could get, let’s say right now, in our brick we take from projects, we clean and we resell. Right now, we do, let’s say 200,000 bricks a year. If I would get 2 million bricks a year from sites around the Montreal area, well I could clean them much more efficiently, I could start to automate and I’ll develop my process and bring my cost per brick a lot down, by a factor is probably 10 to 20.

Mary W. Rowe So let me, Marcos, do you have a rule? I mean, you’re in the business of working in municipal government. Is there a particular rule that you would put on the books, take off the books?

Marcos Alejandro Badra Well, not a rule, but maybe the strategy. Today we are working, we need a more comprehensive approach for circular economy and try to understand how the materials are going to work around that. In my experience, what we are doing here in Richmond, we need more system thinking approach in how we are connecting, because we have a lot of rules right now in the market. You just start to dig, the circular economy is not a new concept. Even though it’s not saying circular economy, you can see legislation that is 30 years old and is still working on this concept and this idea, but it’s disconnected. You can see that people are thinking about the environmental aspect, or the environmental impact, or the financial, or the affordability, or the social aspect, how we are using different communities. When you start to put all together in the system thinking approach, the OECD is recommending that for us as a new generation of policy to stop now, map what’s already there, understand the interconnection between this and what is the impact in what we are trying to do, and later just fill the gaps. No, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel in that point. And that was exactly what we did with our strategy. You can see that this covering transversely is cross-casting the different aspects that we have in different…

Mary W. Rowe And you’re illustrating that what a local government can do. I mean, I think this is part of what Natalie’s comment was, let’s figure out where are you, where do you fit in the system and what can you do? And in your case, in municipal government, you have been able to create a framework and you have able to incentivize this, right?

Marcos Alejandro Badra But we need also the framework coming from the province and from the federal level. Because cities are very limited in what we can do. And we are working in the system. Industry needs to adapt about what we are asking and provide that for Richmond,  affordability is going to increase costs, because they need to adapt everything just for us. But the whole market is asking that, they can create scale and it is easier to supply that, and faster, and it is a more logical way to approach.

Mary W. Rowe Astra just put up … Thanks Astra, there’s a nice comment in the chat … drawing a parallel from the film industry, where there have been some requirements that have asked, you know, have required a sustainability plan that Telefilm Canada is doing. Thanks for this. We’ve only got a few minutes left. Carly, I’m going to come back to you. It’s obviously, this isn’t a new conversation. I appreciate that. Lots of you have been toiling in the vineyard for a while on these topics, but we are at an interesting moment where the economy is relocalizing in some ways, where we haven’t operated, where we obviously are experiencing the impacts of climate and lots of factors that could in fact support this kind of stewarding, more thoughtful steward of resources. If you had, if you wanted, again, in the next two or three years, what are you going to be doubling down on and focusing? I’m going to ask everybody that. We’ve only got four minutes. So talk to yourself accordingly. Quick, go Carly …

Carly Connor I’ll say for the last few years, everything that everyone just said on this call were the problems and solutions, but how to connect it. And so, I’d say with Natalie’s point of logistics, so we’re building a marketplace with the logistics. And then you needed the trust in the materials. We’re attaching that engineering level of trust that the original design team had in those materials and attaching it to like, just not have random materials in a yard, but have them be trusted and create that real network. And then we’re creating a reuse collective to bring the whole design community and owners together to share the information, to share the costing, to input all of the available materials and say like, you know, does anyone want these? This is what it’ll cost me.

Mary W. Rowe Yeah, yeah, you’re creating a kind of a collection.

Carly Connor Because people want stuff, like really, like this conversation started an exact year ago with Natalie being like, if you can like provide these materials, like I want them, but there’s no system to provide them.

Mary W. Rowe So we’re back to this connective tissue logistics. Got it.

Carly Connor And take it from a project to a cross projects of like…

Mary W. Rowe Right, a portfolio. Isis, thought from you, we’re going to run out of time, so just briefly.

Isis Bennet Everything Carly said, plus stay tuned for standardization. We’re working on that. And I’m hoping to have new news soon on structural steel.

Mary W. Rowe You heard it here first, structural steel standardization coming soon to a community near you. Xavier.

Xavier Brochu So on our end, our end goal is to get to a point where it makes sense for institutional and regular projects, we have brick re-use as the primary option. So for us, what’s really going to be important across Canada in the next two, one or two, three years is to get those bigger projects kind of done with partners that want to make a difference. We have a couple pilot projects that are going to be, one in Quebec, one in Chardonnay, one in Sherbrooke, one Montreal, getting those projects done to prove that like brick re-usel on-site can be, it makes sense that there’s an economy that can be done on the project, get those done, so that we can get on more and more, we can be specked more and projects.

Mary W. Rowe Perfect. Marcos?

Marcos Alejandro Badra More spaces to get these kinds of conversations and include more actors, I guess is a key to create a pretty competitive space where we can collaborate to co-create together and approach common problems, it’s crucial.

Mary W. Rowe Totally. Last word to you, Natalie.

Natalie Voland Be prepared to live in chaos and figure it out.

Mary W. Rowe On that true and hopeful, hopeful note, thank you for joining us for CityTalk. And really, Carly, thank you for pulling this group together. We’ve been delighted. And as usual, the chat never disappoints. Many, many, many great resources and exchanges and what about and questions. WhatsApp groups. That’s all blown up over there in the chat. Thank you for joining us. Great to meet you, Xavier, Carly, you and I’ll stay in contact, obviously, Marcos, Isis and Natalie, great to see you again. We’ll put some good stuff in the chat so people can see, or we’ll post it probably on social, some of your projects and some of the work. And I do hope that we’ll continue this conversation and continue to animate people. This is what CUI is in the business of doing, of creating connective tissue, so CityTalk is part of that. I just want to say, as I suggested, we’re at the end of our CityTalk season, end of June. I want to thank Wendy Rowland and Emily Wassmansdorf and Emily Charlebois, who have been the principal producers of CityTalk. Many CityTalk staff, CUI staff that participate. And then all of us that have been regulars on CityTalk, thanks gang, people come in from all over the world. You’re on holidays, you still come into CityTalk. As I say, you download later. This is an important part of how we’re building the fabric of Canadian communities. And we’re benefiting from people around the world, and we have listeners and participants from around the word too. So really great to be part of this. We’ll take a break now. We’re going to move a little bit more to more podcasts, because we’re going to have more in-depth conversations. We always say that these CityTalks are really like a buffet, they’re like a little sampler. And then afterwards, invariably people say, look, I really would have liked to heard more from Marcus or more from Xavier or more from Isis or more from Carly or more from Natalie. So we’re going to move to more podcasts where we can have longer conversations, which is good. But we will always have this place. And I just want to put a shout out to those of you that have been tuning into CityTalk since March, 2020. We have continued together to navigate uncertain times, times of extraordinary challenge, but where we all had shared a fundamental commitment to the benefit of our community and to boosting its economic, social, and environmental quality. And we’re all engaged in that. So thanks city builders across the country. Thanks for being part of CityTalk. Have a great rest of the week, and I hope you have a great summer vacation, and we’ll see you back… We’ll see you back here soon, on a screen near you. Thanks again. Great to see everybody.