The Future of Demolition

How the circular collective Insert is renovating the construction sector

This blog is based on an interview with Peter Kreukniet. Dutch translation here.

Photo: Stichting Insert

Peter Kreukniet feels less at home with a very ideological approach to sustainability, in his words "the tree-hugger type", and prefers a practical, market-driven approach. He is a marketer by background, trained in commercial economics, and has worked in the chemical and adhesives industry at multinationals such as AkzoNobel and Henkel. At 52, a reorganization suddenly left him at a crossroads: "So what am I going to do now?"

The answer came partly from his wish to leave something valuable behind for his children, and partly from his own upbringing. Peter belongs to the baby boomer generation and grew up at a time when reuse was not a buzzword, but often a necessity and common sense. "Circularity, if you look at the older generation, comes more from preserving things," Peter says. "How can we repair things?" He remembers, for example, that his mother's tumble dryer lasted fifty years. That contrasts with today's consumer culture, in which products more often have a shorter lifespan. Producers face the challenge of bringing commercial business models, affordability, repairability, and a longer product life together.

His move from the linear corporate world to the circular construction economy began when he started working at a demolition company. The owner gave him a desk, a chair, and the assignment to set up a recycling branch within the company: "Just think of something and figure it out." It was 2012, and circularity was still a niche back then. But Peter soon saw that the real key to circularity did not lie within one company, but in collaboration.

When Insert was set up in 2018, growing out of the ambition to reuse materials from the large-scale demolition of two hospitals, Peter made a deliberate choice: Insert would be an independent foundation. "In the circular world, it's important that you can work with everyone," Peter explains. As a commercial party, working with one large contractor would immediately arouse suspicion among that contractor's competitors. As an independent foundation, Insert can instead act as a neutral connector who gets everyone around the table.

Photo: Stichting Insert

Should we be demolishing at all?

When we talk about circularity in construction, I naturally started the interview with the most fundamental question: should we be demolishing at all?

According to Peter, in current construction practice, full demolition is often preferred because within existing schedules, budgets, and responsibilities this route can seem simpler, faster, and cheaper than a careful investigation into renovation and preservation.

This is a shared challenge: the construction value chain is still largely set up for new raw materials and predictable new-build processes, while every new square meter requires energy and raw materials. Real circularity therefore starts with seriously investigating how existing buildings and components can be better used.

Even so, demolition is often still chosen. Besides cost, time, and feasibility, there is also the professional wish to leave behind a recognizable design or result. Architects work within the ambitions and conditions set by clients, regulations, budgets, and available materials.

At the same time, there is a growing awareness that architectural quality and circularity can reinforce each other. More and more architects are exploring how to keep a building's structural core and still make a recognizable and valuable contribution with a new, high-quality envelope.

To determine whether raw materials are kept in the chain at the highest possible value, the 10-R ladder is often used. In practice, Peter reduces the R-ladder to three concrete R's that are often feasible: Reuse, Refurbish, and high-value and low-value Recycling.

Photo: R-ladder

But how much of a demolished building can actually be reused? In the industry, figures of up to 90% are sometimes quoted, with different definitions of reuse and recycling getting mixed up. Peter stresses that the result depends heavily on the type of building, the condition of the materials, the available market for them, and the technical requirements. In intensively used social housing, for example, high-value reuse can be extra difficult.

A major challenge in the construction and demolition sector is that projects are driven by tight budgets, strict schedules, volumes, and contractual obligations. As a result, professionals end up choosing applications on the lower rungs of the R-ladder, because logistics, regulations, and markets already exist for them. Think of concrete that is used as road foundation after demolition as low-value recycling (R8), or wood that is used for energy generation with subsidies (R9). Such applications can limit material loss, but they don't automatically move the sector toward high-value reuse. That next step requires suitable business cases, design choices, quality assurance, storage space, client commitment, and collaboration across the whole chain.

At the same time, the low R-ladder applications are sometimes simply the most realistic option given current volumes and technical requirements. Concrete, for example, can rarely be reused at high value for 100%, and there is still real demand for road foundations. If we stopped using demolition concrete for that, an alternative would be needed, which may be less circular than what we do now. Second-order thinking matters here: if we banned the lowest rungs of the R-ladder without a real alternative, the net result could be less circular, not more.

Four stakeholders, four interests

To get to the New Economy, the parties involved in the chain need to better align their ways of working and their interests. That is complicated, because each party has its own responsibilities, risks, expertise, and constraints.

Project developers have a lot of influence on design and investment decisions, and work within financial feasibility, lead times, regulations, and market demand. Peter describes how the focus can lie heavily on speed, marketability, and getting the next project started on time. At the same time, developers can make circular choices possible when risks, returns, and performance are clear up front. Housing associations (woningcorporaties in Dutch) also regularly commission demolition, renovation, and new construction. Their core task is to provide affordable, good-quality housing for people on lower incomes. They have to weigh circularity against availability, housing quality, affordability, and continuity for residents. There are also private clients and housing cooperatives, where residents jointly remain the owners. Insert sometimes works with such initiatives, but limited budgets can make it harder to apply circular solutions.

Architects increasingly want to design circularly and can play an important connecting and creative role in that. In the Dutch construction process, however, their influence is partly determined by their assignment, the available budget, regulations, material information, and the choices of developers and contractors. To make circular ambitions achievable, they need early collaboration and more autonomy in the assignment.

Demolition contractors and dismantling companies have valuable knowledge of materials, safety, logistics, and careful dismantling. They often work under high time and cost pressure, and for high-value reuse they also need timely material inventories, certainty that the materials will find a buyer, storage space, and suitable contract agreements.

Municipalities link societal ambitions to their roles as policymaker, permit issuer, landowner, and client. In doing so they deal with shifting political priorities, legal frameworks, and long-running construction processes. Lasting goals and workable agreements can help professionals hold on to circularity from one council term to the next.

In this web of different interests, Insert works as an independent foundation to connect the parties. The organization brings interests and expertise together, discusses practical obstacles, and supports the market in making circular choices step by step.

Photo: Stichting Insert

What Insert does

The material inventory. Before a demolition or conversion, construction experts first carefully map what is in a building. Peter: "Building professionals go into the buildings and survey the space. They look: what's in here? And what can I reuse?" With digital survey technology, every material is categorized according to national standards such as STABU, down to the finest detail: "I have a door. Is that door left-hinged, right-hinged? Flush door, overlay door? What are the dimensions, what is the quality? You can just fill all of that in digitally." This way, 300 products are ready in one go to be published on the marketplace, and a digital building passport is created that records exactly where each element comes from.

The marketplace. It all began with the need to give materials from demolition projects a second life. Suppliers enter their materials once on their own familiar sales channel, via an API connection or plugin, and thanks to that connection they automatically appear on Insert's national platform as well. "One entry, two platforms," Peter calls it. Interested buyers can contact the supplier with one click.

Within this digital platform model, Reuse (R3) is firmly at number one: by offering harvested materials through the marketplace directly in their original form and physical function for new projects, the extraction and production of new, environmentally harmful materials are prevented.

Insert is currently investigating how the fragmentation of circular construction marketplaces can be reduced. There are now more than 300 of such platforms in the Netherlands. Many initiatives face the same challenges: sufficient visibility, up-to-date supply, reliable product information, and enough transactions to function sustainably. As an independent link, in its role as the National Platform for reusable products, materials, and raw materials, Insert wants to contribute to a national "circular highway" that digitally connects these initiatives and in doing so makes more scale and reach possible.

Photo: Insert Marktplaats

The Insert Cooperative. Because Insert, as a foundation, does not want to operate commercial sales channels, the Insert Cooperative was founded at the end of 2020. In it, thirteen demolition contractors work together to physically process material flows and reuse them at high value. Think of refurbishing (R5) suspended ceiling tiles that might otherwise end up in the incinerator, or reprocessing tropical hardwood from demolition projects into new window frames with a KOMO and FSC Recycled certification. The cooperative shows how demolition contractors and dismantling companies can use and further develop their existing expertise to play an important role in the New Economy as harvesters of valuable materials.

Practical lessons

Several practical lessons can be learned from Peter's story.

1. Involve both contractors and demolition and dismantling professionals early on to establish what can be retained. Contractors bring knowledge of building, planning, and feasibility; demolition contractors and dismantling companies have specific expertise in safely removing, harvesting, and making materials available again. It is precisely the combination of these two stakeholders that helps to make circular choices feasible.

2. Build trust with achievable steps. An immediate ambition of 100% circularity can raise questions among project developers and other clients about costs, planning, quality, and risks. "Let's just weave in 2, 3, or 4 percent circularity. It won't cost you more, you won't lose any time, and you'll like it." Once a first application demonstrably works, there is room to scale up further in later projects.

3. Align policy with practice on the ground. Policymakers can set the direction through their written ambitions and frameworks; project managers and delivery teams have to realize them on time, within budget, taking into account safety and quality measures. Involve them early, and make sure circular solutions can be applied in practice.

4. Ensure independent governance. If you want to transform a sector, you have to be able to stand above the parties. By safeguarding your independence, for example in a foundation, you prevent commercial competition from blocking the necessary collaboration.

 

Towards the New Economy

Insert makes an important contribution, but operates within a construction chain where circular initiatives often still struggle to compete with established linear processes. Developers, investors, and other market actors have to weigh returns, risks, regulations, and continuity, while organizations like Insert put in a great deal of effort to get new collaborations and business models going. The challenge is to better connect financial value and societal value, so that investing in circularity is not used merely for marketing purposes, but actually contributes to long-term reuse and the further development of the circular economy in practice.

The figures confirm that urgency. Peter estimates the current reuse rate in construction at only 1.5 to 3%. According to the National Harvest Report 2026, almost 5 million tonnes of building materials are released each year from demolition and renovation projects in residential and non-residential construction, of which only 10-15% is reused as high-value building material. The official National Approach to Reuse of Building Materials aims for 30% reuse of materials from buildings and infrastructure by 2035, a target year that was already adjusted compared with earlier, more ambitious goals.

Part of that gap is related to the tax system: labor is taxed relatively heavily, while the use of new materials is taxed less directly. As a result, reuse, which often requires more research, dismantling, storage, quality control, and craftsmanship, is harder to make financially viable. This cannot simply be blamed on individual demolition contractors, developers, or other professionals being unwilling; it is a systemic issue that calls for supportive policy, suitable procurement terms, and better valuation of labor and retained materials.

The Building Decree (Besluit bouwwerken leefomgeving) also sometimes works against circularity instead of supporting it. It sets strict requirements on, for example, ceiling heights and door widths, which means an old door from a demolition project often cannot simply be placed as is in a new building. Part of the solution therefore lies not only with market actors such as Insert, but also with regulation that adapts to what is already already available as reusable material, instead of every reused material having to bend to constantly changing standards. A potentially interesting solution is modular construction based on the circular materials that are available.

After the conversation with Peter, I wondered which questions we need to keep asking, to make sure "the small steps" he talked about actually lead toward the New Economy, and not toward greenwashing the old one. I came up with the following three:

1. Does the initiative deliver more housing with less energy and material use?
2. Who owns and governs it, and how are financial and societal returns distributed?
3. Is the initiative good for human wellbeing, affordable, and accessible?

Real circularity is not about throwing away and reusing more efficiently, in order to keep maximizing profit within the old system. It is about the courage to ask who benefits, what we actually need, and whether we can do more with less.