Lagemaat is a Dutch pioneer in circular construction, specializing in the careful dismantling, recovery, and reuse of building materials at scale. This winter, BUILD traveled to the Netherlands to visit their offices and operations, where reuse is treated not as an ideal, but as a functioning industry. We sat down with Arend van de Beek and Justin Houtman to discuss how Lagemaat is building the logistics, expertise, and market infrastructure needed to make material reuse a practical part of contemporary construction. Read part 1 here and the full portfolio of photos can be viewed here.
Having fine-tuned the circularity process, describe Lagemaat’s current business model.
Arend van de Beek: We call it remolition—demolition plus reconstruction. The challenge is that while raw material may come at low cost, the labor of careful disassembly, long-term storage, and recertification adds complexity. A new hollow-core slab is normally stored for six weeks. We store slabs for two to five years. That changes everything. Storage becomes infrastructure.
How is this progress changing the industry?
AvdB: Manufacturers are beginning to explore systems where elements are remountable and already certified for second and third life. Imagine concrete slabs with identification chips, instructions for disassembly, and a guaranteed return pathway. That’s where this is heading. In the future, demolition and construction companies will merge. Construction becomes disassembly. Disassembly becomes construction.
What will actually nudge the construction market as a whole toward reuse?
AvdB: Proof that it can be done. Our projects show that if you want a building with 80% less CO₂ and almost no raw material input, it can be done. If that becomes a serious requirement in the bidding process, contractors will take this much more seriously. Right now, we’ve spoken with all the major contracting players in the Netherlands. They don’t feel threatened. They say: It’s very nice—go ahead—but don’t count us in. They want to learn from our experience, but they think it’s too risky in practice. Every week, contractors and agencies come here and we show them everything. We’re building a center where we can host 250 people and demonstrate the process in real time.
Do you think policy needs to enforce this transition?
AvdB: In the end, you need rules to create a level playing field. This is not something one company can do alone. The transition involves everyone: banks, governments, legislation, financing, and manufacturers. If materials are still manufactured in ways that ensure they can never be reused—so the manufacturer can sell new materials in the next round—then we won’t get anywhere.
Justin Houtman: Manufacturers need new business models. And once one of them puts this new business model into practice, competition will follow. Manufacturers that don’t will disappear.
Are the most successful policy mechanisms incentives, penalties, or requirements?
AvdB: All of the above. But the greatest impact comes from creating a requirement—because circularity is ultimately about balancing demand and supply. You can push a lot of reused materials into the market, but if you don’t create demand for them, the system will never work.
JH: That’s why remolition is, in a way, a temporary business model. If buildings are designed for disassembly from the beginning, reuse becomes much simpler. It becomes unscrewing instead of breaking.
When do you think contractors will be forced into this shift?
AvdB: In a few years, contractors will lose customers because clients won’t get permits if they produce too much CO₂. I think what we now see in the Netherlands with nitrogen restrictions will eventually occur with CO₂. By 2030, we have to be on par with emissions goals in building, and we are not on track. At some point, a hospital or major project will be ready to build, but it won’t receive approval because the carbon impact is too high. Then the market will change very quickly.
JH: That’s the way it’s going to be. I don’t know if it will be prohibited outright, but it will be made very difficult to build in a way that produces excessive CO₂. Then builders will have to work with timber or second-hand structural material. And most contractors don’t know how to do that yet—because they don’t need to care right now. But they will.
Where does Lagemaat fit in that future model?
AvdB: We increasingly see ourselves as a coordinating company. In the future, the builder becomes the demolisher, and the demolisher becomes the builder. Those company types will merge. Manufacturers will also play a role, because they know their products best. It’s a bit peculiar that we are refurbishing slabs right now. The manufacturers understand slabs better than we do. Eventually, they will take materials back into their own supply chains.
So that circular construction becomes a closed-loop system?
AvdB: Exactly. I said to one manufacturer: you drive from your factory with trucks full of new slabs into the built environment. We take the same slabs out of buildings. Why don’t you load them onto your empty return truck and bring them back into your production line? That is a closed-loop logic. European legislation is coming that will require digital product passports—documentation that follows a building product through its lifecycle. Secondary materials will become part of that system.
What role do raw material constraints play in pushing countries like the Netherlands toward concrete reuse?
AvdB: In Nordic countries, aggregate is plentiful. You dig a tunnel through a mountain and what comes out becomes concrete aggregate. In the Netherlands, it’s very different. We rely on gravel from rivers, and those rivers are empty. There is still gravel in the south, but extracting it would require destroying forests, and permits are no longer granted for such work. Sand is also becoming a problem because the Netherlands is small. There is no place to mine endlessly. So raw materials are becoming constrained, while the CO₂ burden continues to rise. That makes reuse not just ethical, but necessary.
What about concrete that doesn’t pass the test and cannot be reused structurally?
AvdB: Traditionally, demolition concrete is crushed and reused only as foundation material. But courts and regulators began requiring that concrete be kept separate, because if you crush it cleanly, you can reuse it as aggregate for new concrete. That led to innovations like “smart crushing.” Instead of smashing concrete, certain systems rub it apart, separating gravel, sand, and cement powder. The cement powder becomes a fine filler. If we can create fillers that are technically superior and environmentally better, then waste becomes a high-value product. That’s where the industry is heading.
Describe a project that exemplifies the Lagemaat approach.
JH: The Kruizinga building in Wapenveld, Netherlands. From the outside, it’s a timber, bio-based building. But structurally, it’s made of donor steel, and the hollow-core slabs came from a previous project in Amsterdam. The windows were also harvested from a project in Amsterdam, and the roof is reused steel. More than 80% of the building is made from reused materials. And even the wood is reclaimed from demolition projects. That’s not theory—that’s reality.
Big picture thoughts to leave us with?
AvdB: The real transformation is that buildings are no longer the end of materials. They are temporary storage. The built environment becomes a material bank. And the companies that succeed will be the ones that can coordinate that flow—technically, economically, and politically. Circular construction is not a niche; it’s the future baseline.
Arend van de Beek is a Director at Lagemaat, where he leads the company’s circularity program and strategic development. His work focuses on digital transformation, circular workflows, and embedding residual value thinking into both demolition and new construction processes. He studied Business Informatics at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences in Zwolle, the Netherlands, and founded his first company in 1989, expanding it while completing his degree. Prior to joining Lagemaat, he was an IT entrepreneur — experience that now informs his systems-driven approach to circular construction.
Justin Houtman is a BIM Integration Engineer at Lagemaat, where he develops digital workflows that support circular construction and material reuse. His work focuses on integrating BIM with deconstruction planning, material tracking, and reuse logistics to improve data transparency and efficiency. He studied Building Construction Technology at Deltion College in the Netherlands, grounding his digital expertise in hands-on construction knowledge.