A house under construction in Burnaby is testing whether using as much reclaimed materials as possible can meet the rigorous demands of the Passive House building standard. The project lead and owner, Erick Serpas Ventura of VEMA Deconstruction, is using his own home-building project as a test bed for high-performance building while incorporating recovered polystyrene insulation, salvaged Douglas fir framing, industrial glulam components, and prefabricated wall panels made using reclaimed materials.
“If we’re gonna build a home, let’s build it the best we possibly can, based on health and reclaiming materials – that’s really the future of homes,” said Ventura.
The project is part of a small but growing push across Canada to rethink how buildings come apart and what happens to the materials they contain. It reflects an older model, from before mechanical excavators could tear down buildings in days. It is a labour-intensive process that involves extracting materials by hand, separating them, and then diverting them to various locations across a city (trying to get the best use out of them along the way). Today, this method competes against the high waste, low cost option that sends most construction, renovation, and demolition (CRD) waste to landfill.
CRD waste accounts for 27 percent of the total municipal solid waste disposed of in Canadian landfills, with only some 16 percent of all waste getting diverted. Studies have shown that this number could be flipped and the average CRD diversion rate could jump to 75 percent or upwards of 88 percent.
In the low-margin, system-stacked-against-you world of deconstructing buildings, survival depends on flexibility, reinvention and optimization. In space-constrained urban markets like Vancouver and Toronto, entrepreneurs are developing new techniques, services, and products with limited policy support, attempting to build a viable industry from materials the current system is designed to discard.
Competing on cost, refining the flow
Across the country, among the sprouting towers along Toronto’s waterfront, the CEO of Ouroboros Deconstruction, Meredith Moore, leads a tour of some 40 built-environment professionals through her new deconstruction depot and marketplace. In one of the last remaining, low-rise small industrial warehouses along the waterfront, she shows off a range of reclaimed doors, lumber, lights, and more, while answering questions about her business and operations.
Adjusting to the new space, the team has gotten into the groove of deconstructing and optimizing the work flow,” she says.
“We do a project, we have a tonne of materials to process into inventory; we do another project, and we keep going,” she tells the crowd. Innovation right now is optimizing the deconstruction process, and getting the flow of reclaimed building materials and resources in and out efficiently to compete with the open market for demolition services.
After some trial and error, Moore says she has found a sweet spot where her company’s services can compete. When a residential homeowner is looking to gut their home interior, but keep the bones (and so a mechanical excavator can’t be used), her services can match the time and cost, she says.
“Why demolish when you have the option to deconstruct, if the price point and timeline are going to be similar,” said Moore. “For full house demolition, deconstruction doesn’t compare, but for an interior gut – one of the most popular types of renovations in Toronto – we are very much on par.”
Moore’s front of house, filled with reclaimed wood furniture, tables, and art, reflects her designer roots and the range of partnerships she’s built to move recovered materials back into use. For the circular-orientated professionals in attendance it’s a vision of what different systems could create: beauty from trash.
Before founding Ouroboros Deconstruction, Moore trained in interior design at Parsons School of Design and worked for over a decade in residential design. After moving to Toronto in 2019 she initially launched a design practice. She then started Ouroboros after being “blown away by the waste and the lack of appreciation for history and craftsmanship,” she said.
Ouroboros’s new location is temporary. It may be a couple of years or maybe five Moore says until they need to find a new warehouse in order to make way for a new development. It’s her third location in as many years since she started her business, taking advantage of cheap real estate where she can, reflecting the difficult nature of trying to run a space-intensive business in a space-constrained town where there is no specially designated or public space for circular businesses.
Both Ventura and Moore are offering more than deconstruction services. They’re also trying to piece together the missing parts of a nascent industry: storage, new products, resale, processing, and verification.
Re-inventing the supply chain
Ventura’s Burnaby home is a live tracker of the progress and partnership he’s making as he develops his deconstruction business, including the recent deconstruction of the former Saputo Inc. dairy plant site in Burnaby. The 215,000-square-foot facility was one of the largest recent deconstruction efforts in Western Canada that had the goal of diverting 95% of materials from landfill. The project is using 45,000 pounds of reclaimed material, including recovered long-span glulam beams, tongue-and-groove Douglas fir, and over 20,000 square feet of polystyrene insulation, said Ventura.
“We brought the insulation over to our place, we stored it, and then once the gravel in the basement was done, we put it as the flooring,” said Ventura. “We did nine inches around the house as a sweater and that was very cool because that helped get us closer to Passive House.”
The prefabricated wall panels, made in partnership with Kiwi Innovations, integrate reclaimed lumber from VEMA’s deconstruction jobs into the high-performance assemblies. Following the prefab pilot, Ventura is exploring partnerships with additional prefab manufacturers to test how reclaimed materials can be standardized, scaled, and deployed into repeatable construction systems.
Salvaged Douglas fir is used structurally within panels and partition walls, while lower-grade material is deployed for formwork, scaffolding, shoring, and back framing, he said. Glulam beams recovered from the Saputo site are being reworked into furniture and architectural elements, including tables, stairs, and custom components. Machined tongue-and-groove lumber is being adapted into ceiling panels, soffits, accent walls, and exterior applications such as patio flooring.
“We’re just imagining whatever we want,” Ventura said. “Moving this material and keeping it in use – that’s the whole point.”
Ventura founded VEMA Deconstruction in 2022 after seeing structurally sound homes in Vancouver routinely demolished and sent to landfill.
Move faster or fail
Since starting his business, Ventura has been refining his process. His team has been developing a hybrid “defab” approach. Instead of dismantling buildings piece by piece, larger wall and roof assemblies are removed intact, transported, and then processed off site. The approach reduces time on site while preserving material value, addressing one of the core barriers to deconstruction. (This approach is not available in Toronto, where double brick wall assemblies limit its viability.)
Ventura’s next focus is on establishing a material exchange model that connects deconstruction outputs directly with future projects before reclaimed inventory leaves the site. The goal is to reduce reliance on storage, lower handling costs, and treat recovered materials as pre-sold inventory. “We don’t want to store it. Just move A to B,” said Ventura.
Meanwhile, Moore has been developing in-house AI tools to identify wood species, estimate age, assess quality, and streamline auditing processes, helping her team better sort and match materials to specific project needs. The goal is to reduce the labour intensity that makes deconstruction costly while focusing on delivering high-quality materials.
“I think the advent of AI is really going to help. Using AI, we’re able to reduce labour in some ways and become more efficient, but still prioritize the things that are important,” said Moore.
The next phase of growth will be greatly aided by building codes and standards bodies signaling that reclaimed materials can be used. Insurers and lenders shape favourable risk and financing decisions. Developers and builders create demand through procurement. Policy makers prioritize and support deconstruction, reduce wide-spread landfilling, and align regulations and incentives with material reuse.
Deconstruction is constrained by missing infrastructure, including systems for storage, resale, processing, and verification that allow materials to move efficiently through the market. Ventura and Moore are navigating these gaps directly, addressing bottlenecks by developing new partnerships, services, and workflows to overcome structural barriers. As these elements begin to connect and demand grows from designers and builders, deconstruction has the potential to move beyond niche adoption and establish a viable marketplace built one used brick at a time.
This article is a collaboration between Passive House Canada and Circular Construction Canada
