Reusing Construction Waste with Joel de Mowbray of Yes Make

What if the materials a building needs are already sitting in a skip down the road?

Joel de Mowbray, founding director of Yes Make, joins Grant Gibson to explain how a regenerative design and build practice rescues high-quality construction materials from landfill — and builds a viable business around them. Earlier this year, Yes Make joined forces with interdisciplinary design collective Resolve Collective and architecture practice Material Cultures to launch Tipping Point East, a circular construction hub in east London that aims to divert tonnes of material from waste.

In this episode, we dive into the practical realities of reuse in construction. We discuss:

• Tipping Point East: Founding a circular construction hub and what it takes to make reuse work at scale.
• Cooking with what's in the fridge: How Yes Make designs around the materials it already has, rather than specifying from scratch.
• Elton John's purple kitchen: The strange, brilliant afterlives of salvaged fixtures and fittings.
• The 'wild west' of industrial sites: Working on the edges of the construction industry, and building a studio from materials already to hand.
• The challenges of reuse: Why the industry still finds it easier to demolish than to recover.
• Public engagement: Why bringing people into the process is central to the practice.

Joel also reflects on living on a former Dunkirk 'little ship', moving from Lambeth Council to start Yes Make, being a 'lost boy' growing up, why bike mechanics saved him, and how learning from — and working with — his father shapes the projects he takes on.

And remember, Material Matters London runs from 15-17 September at UNLOCKED Shoreditch. It's free for trade but you must register in advance. You can find more information here: materialmatters.design/The-Fair

New to the podcast? Head to materialmatters.design/podcast for our playlists — including 'Start Here', 'Design Icons' and our Material Focus collections on clay, timber, fibre and biomaterials.

Explore more: Visit materialmatters.design for more on our fairs and conferences.

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