From the Editor

In 2023, two unrelated yellow buildings in two different Canadian municipalities, roughly a 4,400-kilometre drive apart, were set to be destroyed. One was Elgin Hall, a brick house built in 1850 in the southwestern Ontario hamlet of Mount Elgin. The other was a wood-framed schoolhouse built in 1912 in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood, a short walk from the water at English Bay.

Both were fixtures of their communities, both had advocates rally to save them, and both were framed and finished with lumber cut from trees that predated them by centuries. Yet both had been written off by their owners as no longer valuable enough to keep.

News of the impending demolition of the “Little Yellow Schoolhouse” in Kitsilano was picked up on social media in January 2023 and, remarkably, by August of that same year, the structure itself was literally picked up, loaded onto a barge, and floated across the Burrard Inlet to a new location with the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) to become Ta Tsiptspí7lhḵn, a language nest teaching a new generation Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language, culture, and tradition.

For Elgin Hall, there was a different ending. Despite a determined and high-profile push to save the structure, on April 18, 2023, the South-West Oxford council voted four to three to receive a heritage report prepared for that decision as information, enabling the owner to apply to demolish immediately. The heritage evaluation had listed the roof, the façade, the cornice, the limestone sills, and the window openings. Twelve days later, a bright yellow excavator took down the 173-year-old structure and left those features, along with the rest of the building, in a pile of rubble. Nothing in the report asked where any of that could go.

Two buildings, one question: if a better circular option could emerge in Kitsilano, why not at Mount Elgin?

There is no simple answer, but the fact that circularity in the built environment is showing up at all is a signal that a circular transition is taking shape.

Working to advance this transition are the people and organizations highlighted in this issue. Chloé Dubois and her team at Ocean Legacy Foundation are dealing with the plastic waste stream the past has already made, clearing the backlog (p. 52). Dwayne Torrey at CSA Group is writing the rules so the next building comes apart—CSA Z782, published in 2006 and cited in the international standard that followed (p. 46)—and Dustin Bowers at PLAEX is betting on reconfigurable walls (p. 56). Gil Yaron at Light House is showing how little the sector measures what its buildings are made of (p. 42). Paul Shorthouse’s essay (p. 16) identifies the risk in jurisdictions racing to build new housing: that we may solve one crisis by creating another.

That warning names the tension running through every story here: we need to move together, and we need to move quickly.

Four British Columbia municipalities have made deconstruction requirements binding. Between May 2022 and October 2023, Grande-Rivière and Chandler, two Gaspésie towns in Québec, took five of their own buildings apart, diverted all but 77 of more than 400 tonnes from landfill at costs the project’s director reports were comparable to or lower than those of demolition, and published a toolkit for whoever goes next.

However, circularity cannot spread faster than the words for it do, and words only work once a sector agrees on them—which is the slow work of a standards process. Highest and best use, salvage audits, adaptive reuse, design for disassembly, deconstruction, relocation: an industry or community cannot ask for what it cannot yet name.

Until relocation entered the conversation, the Little Yellow Schoolhouse was headed for demolition. At Mount Elgin, the community had plenty of words for what Elgin Hall was worth and none for what it was made of. Deconstruction and a salvage audit would have supplied them, but there was nobody in the room whose job it was to say so.

Reporting these stories also turned up approaches in different jurisdictions that converge on one promising strategy: dates. More specifically, it is what gets attached to the date that matters. In Vancouver, houses built in 1950 or earlier must divert three-quarters of their materials, and those built pre-1910 must salvage three tonnes of wood on top of that.

In San Antonio, Texas, the Office of Historic Preservation administers the deconstruction of houses built in or before 1945—or 1960 inside a historic district—and says plainly that deconstruction governs how a building comes down, not whether it can. Nobody at either counter decides whether the building matters. The date confirms the materials do.

On the topic of dates, there’s one more of particular significance. On January 1, 2027, about four years after both the Little Yellow Schoolhouse and Elgin Hall were in the news, a similar scenario could unfold many thousands of times over. A wave of properties—3,619 in Toronto alone as we go to press—could come off Ontario’s heritage registers unless a council moves to designate them. The dates on those structures are already known. What happens to them next is not yet decided. One of those two yellow buildings is still standing because somebody had a name for what to do next.

Hamish KhamisaEditor-in-Chief, Circular Economy Magazine