Reclaimed brick and timber: specifying salvaged materials with confidence

A pallet of reclaimed brick has no manufacturer’s certificate and no consistent batch number the way a pallet fresh from a modern kiln does. That is exactly what makes it useful for cutting embodied carbon, since it carries none of the emissions of firing a new brick, and exactly what makes it harder to specify with the confidence a standard product data sheet normally provides.

Know what you are buying

Ask where the material came from and what it was used for before it was salvaged, since that history affects how it will perform in its new life. Bricks from a chimney have seen far more heat cycling than bricks from a garden wall, and repeated heating and cooling can weaken a brick’s internal structure in ways that are not always visible on the surface. Bricks from below the damp-proof course of an old building may have absorbed salts from the ground over decades, salts that can cause damaging efflorescence or spalling once the bricks are reused somewhere drier or more exposed.

Test what matters for the job

Compressive strength, frost resistance and dimensional consistency all vary far more in reclaimed stock than they do in new material fresh from a controlled manufacturing process. Test a genuinely representative sample from the actual batch being supplied, rather than assuming the whole pallet, or worse, the whole order across multiple pallets from possibly different original sources, behaves the same way as the sample that happened to be shown at the yard.

Plan for the shortfall

Reclaimed material rarely arrives in exactly the quantity or the condition specified, since it depends on what was actually salvageable from the source building or structure, not on a factory’s ability to simply produce more to order. Build a realistic margin into the order, typically larger than the margin used for new material, and agree explicitly with the design team, before ordering, which elements of the design can flex, a different bond pattern, a blended source, a reduced feature area, if the supply that actually arrives runs short of what was hoped for.

Timber needs its own checks

Reclaimed structural timber should be checked for rot, insect damage and old, sometimes hidden, fixings such as nails or bolts before it is graded for structural reuse. A piece that looks entirely sound on the visible faces can still carry hidden splits or decay from its first life in a different structure, under different loading and moisture conditions, that only becomes apparent once it is stressed in its new role. Structural grading for reclaimed timber generally needs to be more conservative than for new timber precisely because its full history and prior loading are rarely fully known.

Working with a specialist supplier

A reclamation yard or supplier that specialises in construction-grade salvaged material, rather than a general architectural salvage dealer working mainly for decorative reuse, is far more likely to have already screened stock for the structural and durability issues that matter on a construction project. Building a relationship with a specialist supplier early, before the specification is finalised, also gives the design team a realistic sense of what quantities and qualities are actually achievable, rather than specifying a quantity that sounds reasonable on paper but does not match what the reclamation market can actually deliver.

This article is general information and not engineering advice.