Two buckets. That’s all that was left at the end of the day when Nexii, a concrete alternative start-up, tore down one of its first demonstration projects. A 700-square-foot showroom and model home displaying Nexii’s building technology was constructed in 2019 near Vancouver to prove the buildability of the new material, which has far lower emissions than conventional concrete. Now, with the project’s teardown, the company is proving that the material can be deconstructed and rebuilt elsewhere, with very little waste heading to a landfill in between.
“Our buildings are designed for rapid assembly,” says Zosia Brown, Nexii’s vice president of sustainability, “and they’re equally able to rapidly disassemble.”
The project is an example of circular design that Nexii, one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies for 2022, is hoping to make more common through its sturdy panel-based construction system.
Assembly requires little more than craning the pieces onto a foundation and bolting them together. In 2021, the company’s materials were used to construct a Popeye’s fast food restaurant in just two weeks. They’ve also built projects for Starbucks and are currently working on a project for Marriott hotels. They’re also partnering with companies like Siemens and Honeywell to provide the building materials for net zero industrial facilities.
From the building itself, the waste fit inside those two buckets. It consisted of just the sealant used to create an airtight connection between the panels, small sections of weatherproofing, and “a couple of screws that we weren’t able to reuse,” says Brown. “The main waste that was generated was some typical bits and bobs of just having people on site for six days, like coffee cups, lunch waste, and that sort of thing.”
The disassembled building will be reassembled in its original design next month on Saltspring Island, British Columbia, where the new owner will use it as a guest house. It’s an example of what Brown hopes Nexii’s panels can do going forward, which is to use their durability to find new uses far into the future.
“The design life cycles of the conventional buildings that go up are much shorter than the potential lifecycle of the materials and the construction themselves. That leads to a lot of waste,” Brown says. “We want to be a company that’s doing things differently in that regard.”