Inventorying Toronto's single detached housing stocks to examine the availability of clay brick for urban mining

This study examines the stocks of clay brick in Toronto's single detached housing, to provide parameters for city scale material reuse and recycling. Based on consensus from the literature and statistics on Toronto's single detached housing stocks, city scale reusable and recyclable stocks were estimated to provide an understanding of what volume could be saved from landfill and reintroduced into the urban fabric. On average 2523-4542 m3 of brick was determined to be available annually for reuse, which would account for 20-36% of the volume of virgin brick consumed in new house construction in 2012. A higher volume, 6187 m3 of brick, was determined to be available annually for recycling because more of the prevalence of cement-based mortar, which creates challenges for brick reuse in Toronto. The results demonstrated that older housing containing reusable brick were being mostly landfilled and replaced with housing that contained only recyclable brick.