Material extraction has grown far faster than population over five decades and is still accelerating for construction, which makes it a supply risk, not just a sustainability concern. Façades are material-intensive, and the decisions made early in design govern resource demand, replacement cycles and what happens at end of life.

He structured it around a 4R hierarchy, refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, with the highest value at the front end, in doing less. The enabler throughout is design for disassembly: whether a panel stays an asset or becomes waste is decided by how it is fixed. Equitone’s answer is a reversible ‘Uniscrew’ that lets panels be dismantled and reused, while absorbing the differential movement that would otherwise crack them.

Refuse, retaining what already performs, is the highest-value move. At the Nij Smellinghe hospital in the Netherlands, built in 1996 and aiming for net-zero carbon by 2030, a 2023 renovation kept the existing façade: 15,000 of its 23,000 square metres of fibre-cement panels were refurbished and reused, they had been framed without drill holes, so they salvaged cleanly, with new panels added only where needed. Reusing 65% of the façade avoided roughly 250 tonnes of CO₂, and the reclad was itself designed for future disassembly.

Reduce means efficient system design and less waste, down to optimising cut lengths so fewer offcuts are thrown away. Reuse, he argued, is a functional necessity rather than a spiritual one: the Recycling House in Hanover, a 2020 German Façade Award winner, reused salvaged fibre-cement panels, modernised in deep black, for 90% of its envelope, on a demountable timber substructure with visible fixings so the materials can be recovered again.

The through-line: when you design for longevity, choose durable materials at inception and make the fixings reversible, a façade becomes an asset with multiple lives rather than single-use waste, with recycling, rightly, the last resort and not the goal.