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Australia has an opportunity to lead the way in recovering valuable building materials, according to a new research report from Living Lab Northern Rivers, Circular Timber. Source: Australian Rural & Regional News The report shows that carefully deconstructing buildings – rather than demolishing them – can save high-quality timber, reduce waste and create local jobs, and recommends national guidelines so the approach can be adopted more widely. After the 2022 floods, the NSW Government has approved offers for over 900 flood damaged homes, and currently owns more than 800 properties across the Northern Rivers through the Resilient Homes Program – part of Australia’s largest property buyback program. Led by Living Lab Northern Rivers with research delivered by the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the Circular Timber pilot was funded by the NSW Reconstruction Authority, in response to community interest in recovering the valuable timber in these homes. At 125 and 127 Tweed Street, North Lismore, two uninhabitable homes were selectively deconstructed to recover their materials. The work recovered premium old-growth hardwoods including ironbark, cedar, tallowwood and blackbutt from the region’s Big Scrub rainforest, timber that is prized today and effectively impossible to source. Local makers – builders, furniture-makers, artists and craftspeople – then transformed the salvaged timbers into more than 50 new pieces that honour their origin while demonstrating reuse. It was a small-scale example of what could be achieved with right infrastructure and support. The pilot worked through the steps of deconstruction, material storage, product design and manufacturing, to develop the recommendations made in the report. The pilot also showed why deconstruction isn’t yet standard practice. Without national guidelines, recovery facilities or an agreed way to compare costs, it’s difficult to contract deconstruction at scale – especially within the timeframes and budgets of major recovery program. The report’s recommendations are aimed at closing that gap: Deconstruction guidelines. Australia has well-established standards for demolition, but nothing equivalent for deconstruction. Clear, practical guidelines would give councils, contractors and governments a shared way of working. Material recovery infrastructure. A facility to process, store and resell recovered materials would make deconstruction viable, and could in time grow into a regional hub for circular manufacturing and local jobs. A clear way to weigh the value of reuse. Deconstruction is often assumed to cost more than demolition, yet the report notes this has rarely been properly tested. A framework for comparing the real costs and benefits would help decision-makers see the full picture.   Australia’s construction and demolition sector is forecast to generate around 42 million tonnes of material by 2030. Current waste systems already do a good job of diverting material from landfill through recycling such as woodchipping. The pilot tested whether we could go one step further up the waste hierarchy – from recycling to reuse – which keeps more of each piece of timber whole and useful. International research cited in the report indicates careful deconstruction can save an average of 7.6 tonnes of CO?-equivalent per home, and that deconstruction programs overseas support several times more jobs than conventional demolition. “Demolition is fast, but it treats century-old hardwood the same as rubble,” said Associate Professor Berto Pandolfo, the project lead from UTS. “This pilot showed that with care, timber can be recovered intact and re-made into things people value. “What’s missing isn’t capability or community will – it’s the guidelines, infrastructure and assessment tools that would let deconstruction operate at scale.” Dan Etheridge, Engagement Director at Living Lab Northern Rivers, said: “The Northern Rivers has just lived through Australia’s largest property buyback program. That gave us a rare chance to test these ideas in real conditions, and the makers proved the concept. “The opportunity now is to build the systems so the next community facing this doesn’t have to start from scratch.” NSW Reconstruction Authority CEO, Kate Fitzgerald said: “As part of the Resilient Homes Program the NSW Reconstruction Authority has been prioritising the relocation, reuse and recycling of buyback properties wherever we can.At 125 and 127 Tweed Street, North Lismore, two uninhabitable homes were selectively deconstructed to recover their materials. The work recovered premium old-growth hardwoods including ironbark, cedar, tallowwood and blackbutt from the region’s Big Scrub rainforest, timber that is prized today and effectively impossible to source. Local makers – builders, furniture-makers, artists and craftspeople – then transformed the salvaged timbers into more than 50 new pieces that honour their origin while demonstrating reuse. It was a small-scale example of what could be achieved with right infrastructure and support. The pilot worked through the steps of deconstruction, material storage, product design and manufacturing, to develop the recommendations made in the report. The pilot also showed why deconstruction isn’t yet standard practice. Without national guidelines, recovery facilities or an agreed way to compare costs, it’s difficult to contract deconstruction at scale – especially within the timeframes and budgets of major recovery program. The report’s recommendations are aimed at closing that gap: Deconstruction guidelines. Australia has well-established standards for demolition, but nothing equivalent for deconstruction. Clear, practical guidelines would give councils, contractors and governments a shared way of working. Material recovery infrastructure. A facility to process, store and resell recovered materials would make deconstruction viable, and could in time grow into a regional hub for circular manufacturing and local jobs. A clear way to weigh the value of reuse. Deconstruction is often assumed to cost more than demolition, yet the report notes this has rarely been properly tested. A framework for comparing the real costs and benefits would help decision-makers see the full picture. Australia’s construction and demolition sector is forecast to generate around 42 million tonnes of material by 2030. Current waste systems already do a good job of diverting material from landfill through recycling such as woodchipping. The pilot tested whether we could go one step further up the waste hierarchy – from recycling to reuse – which keeps more of each piece of timber whole and useful. International research cited in the report indicates careful deconstruction can save an […]

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New spatial modelling published in Australian Forestry, the peer-reviewed journal of Forestry Australia, finds that only a small share of the private native forest estate along the New South Wales coast and tablelands can support commercial timber production. Source: Timberbiz Of the 3.6 million hectares assessed across 11,722 properties, just 0.6 million hectares, or 17%, is both available and commercially suitable. The finding raises the question of leakage as debate continues over the future of the Great Koala National Park in north east New South Wales. If private native forest cannot deliver at the same scale, where does the timber come from? The research is led by spatial modeller Masoomeh Alaibakhsh of the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, with co-author Nick Cameron of the North East New South Wales Forestry Hub. The team weighed more than 40 spatial datasets to rank every property on how well it could support timber production. The model measured how much of each property could be harvested, how far timber would travel to a mill, how steep and rough the ground is, and the value of the species growing there. Forest that is protected, too rugged to work or too far from a mill was set aside. What remained split heavily to the north. The northern private native forestry region held 0.5 million hectares, equal to 20% of its private forest, while the southern region held 0.1 million hectares, or 9%. “Much of the existing assessed private native forest is not commercially available and suitable,” Mr Cameron said, pointing to small harvestable areas, low-value species, poor site quality and distance from mills. Timber production in the north is more likely to be viable than in the south, with more large properties within reach of more mills. Properties in the south’s lowest suitability class sit an average of 98 kilometres from the nearest mill. Even inside the workable 17%, timber values cluster in the middle, with nearly 62% of properties rated medium and only 0.2% very high. Two or more decades typically pass between light selective harvests, so much of the resource is regrowth not yet ready to cut. The modelling lands as the New South Wales Government makes permanent the closure of 176,000 hectares of state forest in the Great Koala National Park. The reserve ends timber harvesting across its extent. “Not all wood products can be produced by the plantation industry,” the research states, with Australian native timber production down nearly 70% over the past two decades. The authors note that hardwood plantations remain far from a universal substitute for a country that already faces a wood shortage. Blackbutt and spotted gum, valued for their durability and strength, supply the flooring and decking trade and the poles that carry the state’s electricity network. Private native forests were routinely harvested for sawlogs, poles and girders, sleepers and fencing timber, the paper notes. On the other side of the ledger, 83% of the assessed estate, five hectares in every six, is likely to be managed chiefly for environmental and social values rather than timber. Landholders, agencies and processors now have property-scale rankings to guide where limited harvesting effort is best directed. The authors describe that output as the first comparison of ranked results across two discrete forest regions. The study concludes that the private estate cannot meet the expectations placed on it, with just 0.6 million hectares rated commercially workable and much of that still decades from harvest. The research is at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00049158.2026.2694856

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