A salvage pilot in North Lismore has recovered premium old-growth hardwood from two condemned homes intact, pulling ironbark, cedar and blackbutt out of the demolition pipeline and back into use rather than landfill. That is according to Circular Timber, a new report from Living Lab Northern Rivers with research delivered by the University of Technology Sydney and funded by the NSW Reconstruction Authority.
The recovered ironbark, cedar, tallowwood and blackbutt came from the region’s Big Scrub rainforest, timber prized today and effectively impossible to source. It comes as the largest property buyback program in Australia leaves the New South Wales government owning more than 800 flood-damaged homes, each holding materials otherwise bound for demolition.
At 125 and 127 Tweed Street in North Lismore, two uninhabitable homes were selectively deconstructed so their timbers could be drawn out whole rather than shredded for disposal. Local builders, furniture-makers, artists and craftspeople then turned the salvaged hardwood into more than 50 finished pieces, testing every step from deconstruction through storage, design and manufacturing.
Project lead Berto Pandolfo, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, said demolition treats century-old hardwood no differently from rubble despite its scarcity.
“Demolition is fast, but it treats century-old hardwood the same as rubble,” Pandolfo said.
The report’s central finding is that the barrier is no longer capability but the absence of any national framework, with Australia holding well-established demolition standards and nothing equivalent for deconstruction. It calls for national guidelines, dedicated facilities to process and resell recovered material, and a clear method for weighing the real cost of reuse against demolition, which it says has rarely been properly tested.
Australia’s construction and demolition sector is forecast to generate around 42 million tonnes of material by 2030, much of which will be diverted from landfill through recycling, such as woodchipping. The pilot tested whether the sector could climb one step up the waste hierarchy, from recycling to reuse, keeping each piece of timber whole rather than chipped.
International research cited in the report found that careful deconstruction can save an average of 7.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per home, whilst supporting several times as many jobs as conventional demolition. Those gains depend on recovery infrastructure that does not yet exist at scale, leaving the Lismore result a proof of concept rather than a repeatable system.
The pilot sits inside a buyback that is already recovering materials in volume, with the NSW Reconstruction Authority prioritising the relocation, reuse and recycling of bought-back homes wherever possible. Chief executive Kate Fitzgerald said the agency has recycled 74 per cent of material from demolished homes to date, excluding asbestos-contaminated waste.
“We have had 450 homeowners opting in buyback contracts to salvage materials,” Fitzgerald said.
Engagement director Dan Etheridge said the unprecedented scale of the Northern Rivers buyback handed researchers a testing ground they may never see again.
“That gave us a rare chance to test these ideas in real conditions,” Etheridge said.
Building on the pilot, Living Lab Northern Rivers and the Reconstruction Authority are supporting the Jagun Alliance to assess flood-affected homes for culturally significant timbers through a First Nations lens, and to develop a custodianship framework that returns the materials to the community. Executive director Oli Costello said many of the recovered species carry ancestral meaning for the region’s traditional owners.
“They were once ancient forests as far as the eye could see,” Costello said.
The report positions deconstruction as a way to strengthen existing waste systems rather than replace them, as demolition and rebuilding activity rise nationwide with no guidelines in place. Pandolfo said the Tweed Street homes yielded more than 50 finished pieces from hardwood that would otherwise have been bound for landfill, with the report arguing the missing element is national guidelines rather than any doubt about the timber’s ability to be saved.
