Researchers are exploring whether timber recovered from Auckland's flood-damaged homes could one day be reused in construction projects, as the city's post-disaster clean-up continues three years on.
More than 1200 properties were condemned following the Anniversary Floods and Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023.
For Auckland Council, the challenge quickly became what to do with them.
"The first thing we did was, every house we approached, we asked the question, can this house be relocated?" Auckland Council's Kris Bird said.
The council said just under a third of affected homes have since been relocated across the upper North Island. For those that couldn't be moved, deconstruction became the next option.
Rather than treating homes as waste, Bird said the goal was to recover as much material as possible.
"We're trying to look at these houses as not as waste that we have to get rid of but as resources that we can recover and reuse."
The programme is now diverting between 80% and 90% of material away from landfill, with timber among the most valuable materials being recovered.
At Levela Yard in West Auckland, recovered timber is stripped of nails, dried and sorted before being sold for use in landscaping, renovations and other non-consented projects.
"Most of what it's used for is people doing projects at home, non-consented works, gardens," Levela Yard's Alex Hawthorne said.
The next challenge is determining how much more of that timber can be safely reused.
Auckland Council has partnered with researchers at the University of Auckland, who are using digital scanning and data analysis to better understand the materials being recovered and their potential future uses.
"We're trying to bring some science to those processes by digitally scanning things, running numbers so that we can be much more specific and accurate about what's there," professor Andrew Barrie said.
Researchers hope the work will eventually help create a clearer picture of reusable resources across Auckland, allowing more materials from future redevelopment projects or disaster-affected areas to be recovered and reused rather than sent to the tip.
Barrie said the long-term ambition was to start "seeing the city as something like a mine", identifying valuable resources already embedded within existing buildings and putting them back into the system when they become available.
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