Today Cagla Keles represented our Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering at Drexel University and presented her CIRCLE lab research at the #AEI2025 conference. I couldn’t be prouder of her! She absolutely killed it. Cagla talked about her post-demolition materials flow analysis in Philadelphia — the first study of its kind in the U.S. She talked about how our findings highlight that the building materials with the largest embodied and end of life carbon were also the ones that had the highest deconstruction and reuse potential: masonry brick (built with lime mortar) and lumber from roof structures. Beyond contributing a replicable methodology for U.S. cities, we hope to inform local policies such as deconstruction ordinances. We also need to harvest the opportunity of reusing salvaged brick in new buildings! Brick is a great material for thermal mass and climate-related disaster resilience, and we have an abundance of it being disposed in landfills or downcycled into aggregates every year. Of course, there are several systemic changes that need to happen to create market and incentives for material reuse in our industry (I can talk about this all day!)… Paper coming soon!