Last month at Facades+ Los Angeles, hosted by AN in collaboration with NBBJ, a roundtable brought together Buro Happold associate Kathleen Hetrick, Digne founder Sophie Pennetier, Eckersley O’Callaghan director Lisa Rammig, and Infinite Recycled Technologies president of business development Patrick Elmore. The discussion—moderated by NBBJ principal Margaret Montgomery—focused on how circularity is moving from theory to practice through material reuse and glass recycling.
Across back-to-back mini-presentations followed by a Q&A, the speakers considered how material testing, local recovery systems, and policy incentives can extend the life of existing buildings, reduce embodied carbon, and cut waste.
Kathleen Hetrick: “Circularity is not a buzz word, it’s something we can all bring to our projects, right now.”
Hetrick opened the discussion by framing circularity as a practical design approach, spanning deconstruction, material specification, and supply chains. She emphasized that circularity depends on coordination across manufacturers, designers, contractors, and municipalities, noting that change ultimately comes from everyday choices which include circularity audits, deconstruction over demolition, adaptive reuse, and extending material life. For facade engineers, consultants, and architects, she described circularity as both a responsibility and an opportunity to move beyond extractive approaches, toward more durable, inventive, and community-centered design.
Sophie Pennetier: “Circularity becomes real the moment you take a product apart.”
Pennetier grounded circularity in data, arguing for measured impacts over abstractions. By quantifying embodied carbon, she identified aluminum, glass, and transportation as the main contributors and showed that reuse and recycling could cut emissions by a third or more. This led her to disassemble existing units to better understand material lifecycles and the reuse potential of end-of-life glass. Her startup, Digne, focuses on glass reuse, from small projects like reclaimed-glass awards to architectural applications such as fused-glass facade panels for a chapel in Arkansas.
Lisa Rammig: “Reuse works best when buildings are worth saving.”
Rammig challenged the assumption that the building industry is becoming more circular, noting that global circularity rates have declined since 2018 despite growing attention to embodied carbon. She argued this stems from an overemphasis on upfront impacts, with too little consideration of service life, maintenance energy, and end-of-life reuse, especially in facade systems.
Many barriers to reuse, she said, are technical or cost-related but largely solvable, citing the refurbishment of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, where a 1970s unitized facade was dismantled, aluminum framing reused, and glass recycled to achieve far lower embodied carbon than full replacement.
Patrick Elmore: “Glass can be infinitely recycled. It’s just a matter of capturing it at the right moment.”
Elmore described how his company focuses on recycling the most challenging forms of architectural glass, which are typically excluded from standard recycling streams. His team has developed specialized equipment to delaminate laminated glass, clean IGUs, and process assemblies into cullet for reuse—all while working with manufacturers to expand acceptance despite the selectivity of U.S. float plants.
He also highlighted the opportunities presented by retrofit and demolition projects, where large volumes of glass can be captured before reaching landfills. Glass, he argued, is uniquely suited for circularity, provided the infrastructure exists to recover it at the moment buildings are transformed.
Q&A Highlights
Margaret Montgomery (MM): You all have an amazing vision, both for practice and for the industry at large. Where do you think the long-term direction of this work can go?
Kathleen Hetrick (KH): From where we are now, I think our industry has the opportunity to address affordability and the housing crisis in our cities. The circular economy is becoming more local and is reconnecting us with the craftsmanship that long defined architecture. Bringing that back into our cities is a core goal, and it can support job creation and local manufacturing. At the same time, as much of the world moves further into the digital and into AI, we can focus on the tangible things that bring communities together. That’s the long-term vision.
Sophie Pennetier (SP): The concept of material sourcing sovereignty is starting to emerge, and it resonates with many people. We already have so much material available locally, especially at a time when energy costs are rising and international supply chains have faced major delays. The vision of relying on our own materials, our labor, and local jobs is very tangible, and it also presents an opportunity to lead during a period of real constraint in the industry.
Lisa Rammig (LR): It’s interesting to consider how we keep the construction economy moving. We do need to build, and building is a good thing. But now we should be thinking more carefully about how we build with the materials we already have, and how we design with them. We’ve become accustomed to reshaping everything to fit an image, rather than responding to a material’s given format. The challenge now is reaching a point where we can look at what exists and design something that is just as functional, performative, and beautiful as something designed entirely from scratch.
Patrick Elmore (PE): From my perspective, glass recycling is really taking off. More people are getting involved every day. We’re no longer the only ones working in this niche, and we’re actively trying to help more companies do it. Looking ahead five to ten years, I think education is key. We need to raise awareness that it’s not just clean plate glass that can be recycled. Mirrors, IGUs, laminated and coated glass—all of it can be recycled. End markets are growing quickly because the benefits are clear: lower emissions, reduced carbon from green melting, and less reliance on new materials.
MM: Lisa, you mentioned earlier that not all buildings are necessarily worth rehabilitating. Can you elaborate?
LR: It’s important to think carefully about which buildings are worth preserving, and to avoid preserving those that don’t have the capacity to last as long as we expect them to. In places like Italy and Greece, there are buildings that are centuries old and have been repurposed repeatedly over time. In the Netherlands, by contrast, cities are often rebuilt after about 30 years. In such cases, we should be asking which buildings are of sufficient quality to merit preservation, and where it might make more sense to remove what exists and rebuild at a higher standard. There’s also an interesting opportunity in that context, particularly around incentives for removing old glass and bringing it back into use.
MM: Can you explain how those incentives work?
LR: In the Netherlands, old glass is removed, IGUs are opened, and existing panels are paired with newly coated glass to create high-performance units. These incentives are largely developer-driven, since tenants and buyers will pay more for demonstrably sustainable buildings. Elsewhere, approaches vary. In France, incentives are tied to redevelopment allowances, while in Germany they are more regulatory. Overall, it remains a complex system to navigate.
MM: How does recycling come into the equation?
PE: There’s a lot of focus on keeping buildings and upgrading facades, but we also need to think about what happens to the materials being removed, especially glass. Buildings in California are still being renovated just like anywhere else, and glass is still being replaced, which means it needs to be recycled. The problem is that recycling infrastructure for this type of glass is almost nonexistent in California. We’re expanding as quickly as we can and hope to have a facility on the West Coast soon, but for now, much of the glass coming out of these buildings is still ending up in landfills.
KH: At Buro Happold, we’re working with San Diego County on their circular economy plan, and cities and counties are starting to pay attention. They know we can’t keep sending construction waste to landfills. We’re simply running out of space, and living near landfills is a real quality-of-life issue. I think we’re going to see more top-down policy that incentivizes companies like Patrick’s to locate in places like Los Angeles, and manufacturers should be thinking about that as well. There’s funding coming, and I expect California to look very different in the next five years.
SP: On the timber front, some of the timber brought to our campus comes from homes in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, facilitated by reuse organizations. Through those connections, we’re sending multiple truckloads of salvaged timber to rebuild a dozen apartments. What’s important is clearly communicating the value proposition of each material. Timber, especially in residential contexts, is often easier to handle and reprocess, with fewer contamination risks than more complex systems. Starting with materials that are simpler to reuse will be key to scaling these efforts.
LR: It always comes back to material properties. Uncertainty about those properties shouldn’t be a technical barrier. We have the tools to understand and address it.
MM: I’m also curious why recycled glass can be so difficult for manufacturers to accept. Is it technical, business-related, or both?
PE: It’s not that they don’t want to accept recycled glass; it’s that they’re cautious. Float plants often run for decades without shutting down, and the recycled glass they use is typically internal waste they can fully control. Introducing external material carries risk: even minor contamination can cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in furnace damage. That said, the benefits are clear. Recycled glass lowers melting temperatures, extends furnace life, reduces emissions, and cuts material costs. The challenge isn’t willingness, but managing risk, which is why adoption has been slow.
MM: How did you overcome that risk?
PE: It takes time. We’re currently working on a specification for recycling with float plants, collaborating directly with each one to understand how strict their acceptance criteria need to be. We’re compiling that information into a shared standard we can distribute to recyclers. The process requires extensive testing. We send samples repeatedly, sometimes over six months, so plants can see consistent results and build confidence that the material is clean and reliable. One bad run can set things back significantly. It’s a difficult process, but the interest is there. Manufacturers do want to make it work.
LR: They do this in Europe, too, and the process is actually very similar. It comes down to how risk is managed. Each plant has its own quality control requirements and needs confidence that what’s being delivered is safe to introduce back into the furnace. In that sense, there’s no real technical difference. It’s more a matter of more conservative regulation here and less industry pressure, which slows the process.
MM: What are the other advantages of recycling glass?
PE: Not everyone is motivated by carbon savings or environmental goals, but glass has monetary value. We buy most of the glass we recycle because there are strong end markets for it. Like any business, you take a material in, process it, and sell it.
MM: So it’s better than the cost of sending it to a landfill, right?
PE: Absolutely. You can pay to landfill glass, or you can sell it and make money. That’s the incentive, especially for fabricators. Many fabricators see around 15 percent waste. Instead of throwing defects away, they can be sold. With container glass, people collect bottles because there’s money in it. Architectural glass is different, but the principle is the same. We’ve raised this with the National Glass Association in D.C. In Europe, recycling happens because it’s mandated. Here, policy could play a similar role. If a government building is removing glass, it should be required to recycle it when a recycler is available. Even a small mandate like that could go a long way.
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