Basement retaining walls

Day 98: Reclaimed bricks

As a designer I have a passion to create more sustainable architecture. I often see products and buildings claiming to be GREEN because the materials used can be recycled when the life of the product ends. However, recycling is not a prevalent practice in South Africa. Most often, those materials never get recycled and end up on a landfill site. Therefore, the best way to be sustainable is to reuse existing waste materials.

At a landfill site in Pretoria, homeless people collect bricks from construction waste which was dumped there. They clean the bricks and sell it. These bricks can be reused in construction projects, reducing the need to use virgin materials.That is exactly what we are going to do. We started building the retaining walls of the basement using these reclaimed bricks.