Sustainable construction hierarchy

You’ve all heard of the waste hierarchy - reduce, reuse, recycle. Maybe you’ve heard of the transport hierarchy - active travel, public transport, private cars. For buildings, here is a sustainable construction hierarchy - which begins by prioritising that least glamorous of tasks: cleaning.

I have long thought that our economy undervalues cleaning and maintenance, in the same way that it undervalues care work. For a more sustainable economy, we should focus less on building something new, and more on maintaining and looking after what we have - including cleaning! This is part of feminist economics, part of increasing the value given to the work of social reproduction. In traditional feminist economics, social reproduction means raising children and feeding and caring for the (male) adult workers so they can go to work. It is an important part of the economy that is often ignored by valuation processes such as GDP. When it comes to the built environment, social reproduction means cleaning and maintenance - of rooms, furniture, buildings, streetscapes etc.

This issue also permeates supposedly sustainability-oriented parts of the economy - for example a lot of funders and philanthropists want to see their money go into something new. To the endless frustration of people running successful community project, funders are much more likely to fund a pilot project or something new and innovative than to provide ongoing funding to something proven to work, and where long term relationships have already been established. This obsession with novelty makes it hard to prioritise the more ongoing work of cleaning and maintaining, rather than building something new from scratch, when actually cleaning and maintaining can provide much greater ‘value for money’ and certainly less material throughput and ecological destruction.