What leaves the site

How we work

Why the paperwork comes before the excavator

Clients reasonably assume a demolition is priced by its difficulty: the size of the building, the access, the machines required, the hours. Those matter, but in Flanders they are frequently not the biggest variable. What dominates is the status of the material leaving the site. Rubble from a demolition carried out under the supervision of a recognised follow-up organisation, and accompanied by the certificate that process produces, is accepted by a processor as having a low environmental risk profile, and from it the crusher can make certified recycled granulates. Rubble with no traceability is treated as high risk: separated, processed differently, charged at a materially higher rate, and sometimes refused at the gate. Same building, same concrete, different document.

This cannot be repaired after the event, which is the part worth emphasising. The follow-up plan has to exist before the permit application is made, so a demolition that starts without one has already chosen the expensive route. Above the volume thresholds set by the regulations — which differ for residential and non-residential buildings — the plan is compulsory in any case. Below them it is a commercial decision, and more often than people expect it pays for itself out of the disposal cost alone. That calculation belongs in the quotation, stated as a choice with two prices attached, rather than discovered when the weighbridge tickets arrive.

The second thing settled before anything starts is asbestos, and it is worth separating it clearly from the obligation most people have heard of. The certificate connected with selling a pre-2001 building is a seller's obligation in a transaction. What governs a building site is different: before works are undertaken, an asbestos inventory of the workplace is required under the welfare-at-work legislation, because the exposure risk falls on the people doing the work and anyone nearby. Removal by anything other than the techniques classified as simple operations is reserved to recognised undertakings. Where that is what a building contains, the honest answer is that part of the job is not ours, the work pauses, and a recognised undertaking does it before we continue.