Inventorying Toronto's single detached housing stocks to examine the availability of clay brick for urban mining: Fid-Bau Portal

Inventorying Toronto's single detached housing stocks to examine the availability of clay brick for urban mining

Ergun, D. / Gorgolewski, M.

This study examines the stocks of bricks in Toronto's single detached housing, to provide potential environmental benefit parameters for city scale material reuse and recycling. Based on consensus from the literature and statistics on Toronto's single detached housing stocks, city scale reusable and recyclable stocks were determined to provide an understanding of what volume could be saved from landfill and reintroduced into the urban fabric. On average 2,523m³ - 4,542m³ of brick was determined to be available annually for reclamation and reuse, which would account for 20 - 36% of the volume of virgin brick consumed in construction of new houses in 2012. Likewise an even higher volume, 6,875m³ of brick, could be reclaimed for recycling each year because more recent construction practices do not facilitate easy removal of brick in a form that they can be reused. Thus, it was determined that the older housing currently being demolished and mostly heading to landfill has a higher percentage of reusable brick than the new housing construction taking its place.