RotorDC
Recovering sanitary equipment during renovations and cleaning it for reuse
Rotor Deconstruction is an innovative company that focuses on the reuse of building products, especially interior finishing from large buildings of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our goal is to facilitate the reuse of materials within the construction industry.
With this project, we want to specifically investigate a possible new service, namely the reuse of sanitary appliances from office buildings that are often replaced in large numbers during renovations.
Flanders is one of the most densely built-up regions in Europe and office buildings make up a large part of our built-up environment. Every year, around 5% of the total surface area of office buildings is renovated. Roughly speaking, that amounts to 650 double sinks, 1,500 toilets and 500 urinals that are disposed of as waste, only to be bought new. These sanitary facilities, made of ceramic and therefore very durable, are often only a decade old and therefore still perfectly functional if properly maintained.
In order to avoid such waste, we are looking into the possibility of collecting the used sanitary appliances for inspection and thorough cleaning, and then delivering them as good as new. In this way, the budget for purchasing new products is also spent on local employment with a limited ecological footprint.
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What will the future bring?
Thanks to this research, we have been able to develop a cleaning procedure for the reuse of sanitary appliances from office buildings and are able to offer this service to developers and construction companies.
Although it is technically possible to get the appliances as good as new, the cost of the service turns out to be equal or even higher than the purchase price of new appliances. As a result, demand may initially come from construction projects with circular ambitions, rather than from a pure logic of cost savings.
A different approach, whereby the customer delivers the appliances himself to the place where they are to be cleaned, could increase the profitability of our activity.
