The sustainability-focused engineering firm Arup has participated in the launch of NuBau Labs, a European project with €4 million in Horizon Europe funding. Its objective is to give construction materials a second life by recovering them from existing buildings and turning them into new components, rather than sending them to waste.
Conceived together with Queen’s University Belfast and developed by a European consortium, NuBau Labs seeks to address two of the industry’s biggest challenges: the emissions associated with manufacturing new materials and the waste generated during building demolition. Today, many materials that could be reused are crushed or recycled for lower-value applications instead of being incorporated into new structures.
Cities as Major Material Banks
NuBau Labs will develop its first pilot manufacturing center along the River Thames, east of London. The project builds on the concept of urban mining, which posits that resources from existing buildings can be recovered and reused in new constructions.
“This model prioritizes, whenever possible, preserving, rehabilitating, and reusing buildings before demolishing them. When deconstruction is necessary, the aim is to recover concrete and steel elements for reuse in new constructions, rather than crushing them or turning them into lower-value materials.”
Sofía Galán, Arup Spain’s head of building envelopes and façades, notes: “The future of construction isn’t just about using more sustainable materials, but about making better use of the resources we already have. Urban mining invites us to view existing buildings as material banks.”
The center will feature a space where recovered materials will undergo testing, certification, and remanufacturing processes to convert them into components for new buildings. In this way, the project aims to overcome the technical and practical hurdles that still limit large-scale reuse and develop a model that can be replicated in other European cities.
Moreover, the initiative will involve local communities, designers, artists, and engineers to explore how these materials can create high-quality spaces that reflect local identity. Following the principles of the European New Bauhaus, it will fuse sustainability, design quality, and social inclusion.
Kerry Greeves, Arup’s Director and Urban Regeneration Specialist, explains: “Rather than treating end-of-life buildings as waste, we can view them as valuable sources of materials for the next generation of buildings. Concrete is one of the hardest materials to reuse while maintaining high value, and that makes it a key focus of the project.”
ReVault: A New Life for Concrete with 70% Less Embodied Carbon
Concrete will be one of NuBau Labs’ priority materials, as it explores new ways to reuse elements of existing buildings as structural components.
One of the first solutions to be tested will be ReVault, a system developed by Arup that allows recovered concrete to be reused to build floor slabs—the horizontal structural elements that separate the floors of a building. This solution delivers a 70% reduction in embodied carbon compared with conventional floor-slab systems, underscoring the potential of material reuse to reduce the environmental footprint of construction.
Dr. Su Taylor, Professor of Structural Engineering, head of the Intelligent and Sustainable Infrastructure Group at Queen’s University Belfast and project lead, notes: “We are excited to launch NuBau Labs, which will enable yesterday’s concrete to become tomorrow’s iconic buildings. Building on Queen’s FlexiArch systems, we will give recovered concrete a new life in elegant compression-dominated structures.”
