Rebrick aims to supply the Netherlands with second-hand facade bricks. “A lot of those bricks were probably once sold by my grandfather.”
When Bob Floris was twelve years old, he was already working on reuse. As a boy, he stacked old paving stones on pallets for the family business Bouwcenter Floris. With paving stones, that’s relatively easy, he says now. With facade bricks, it’s different. They are fixed with mortar, and it takes quite a bit of processing to get them clean.
Nevertheless, Bob Floris is now going to do this on a large scale. With Rebrick, he handles the sale of second-hand facade bricks from four Bouwcenters spread across the Netherlands. He aims for 20 million reused bricks per year by 2030.
It all started with an assignment for the housing corporation Eigen Haard, which wanted to reuse toilet bowls and sinks.
This gave Floris an even better idea. If they really wanted to make a difference, they should do the same trick with other building materials. “With a really big component in construction,” says Floris. This led them to contact Klinker Historika. The German company has been ‘harvesting’ facade bricks from demolitions for eight years in Germany and three years in the Netherlands.
Bouwcenter Floris had research done that showed about 150 million bricks can be harvested annually in the Netherlands. That’s a fraction of the 600 million to a billion bricks that Bouwcenters sell annually. However, Floris couldn’t deliver them haphazardly across the Netherlands.
Therefore, he started Rebrick at the beginning of 2024, with four different Bouwcenters across the Netherlands as owners. The demand for reused facade bricks is already very high, says Floris. Rebrick has between 1.2 and 2 million bricks in stock. They have roughly the same color and size, but there is no guarantee. “Bricks we have now may be sold out later. So it’s better to buy what you want right away.”
Builders need not worry about the quality of reused bricks, assures Floris. “Bricks can become very old. Most harvested bricks are post-war. There may be a dent or some edges missing, but that gives the brick extra character. There is also more life in the color variation.
That makes it a beautiful, unique product that is also good for the environment.
Bouwcenter Esselink
Bouwcenter van Hoppe & Swinkels
Bouwcenter Concordia
