More than half of the United Kingdom’s waste comes from the construction industry. In London, where buildings are constantly being torn down, renovated and rebuilt, the volume of perfectly usable wood, brick, glass, porcelain and steel that ends up in skips and landfills is staggering.

A salvage and reuse operation called Yes Make has spent the last few years trying to change that — and it has just landed at the largest dedicated circular-construction site in the country.

A 5-acre salvage hub in Newham

Yes Make now operates out of Tipping Point East, a 5-acre industrial site in the London borough of Newham. It’s the largest circular-construction site of its kind in London — and, according to its operators, in the United Kingdom as a whole.

"We’re creating a regenerative supply chain for the city we love," Yes Make founder Joel De Mowbray told the Guardian. "Turning things that would otherwise go to waste into objects that have cultural potential."

The site is run in partnership with Material Cultures, an organization focused on regenerative building materials. Together, the two groups manage everything from sorting and storing reclaimed timber to organizing public education workshops on traditional milling and material reuse.

Saving a 105-year-old sequoia

The Newham yard didn’t just appear because of policy — it appeared because of frustration. De Mowbray launched Yes Make after watching valuable materials get discarded by red-tape-bound processes. One example became a kind of mission statement: a 105-year-old sequoia from the Linford Arboretum that was destined for waste.

Instead, the tree was brought to Tipping Point East, where Yes Make hosted an educational workshop with the National Saw Mills organisation, teaching participants how to use a portable saw mill to turn an old-growth tree into usable lumber.

The same approach applies to less spectacular but equally valuable materials: imported mahogany, teak, afromosia, Douglas fir, and oak — the kinds of hardwoods that built London over generations, and that are now nearly impossible to source sustainably from virgin forests.

From the Docklands to a new coffee roastery

Yes Make’s most recent project shows what reclamation looks like in practice. For the new HEJ Coffee Roastery on Old Kent Road, De Mowbray’s team built a custom structure from Douglas fir and oak salvaged from the London Docklands — wood that once framed warehouses and industrial buildings along the Thames.

"Designed to frame the roasting space and invite the public in, this piece holds stories of the tides and the city alike," the team wrote on Instagram. It is a small example of what circular construction can do at human scale: a piece of London’s industrial past reborn as part of its everyday present.

Discount lumber for working contractors

Beyond high-profile bespoke projects, Tipping Point East operates as a working yard. Reclaimed and refurbished construction materials — beams, bricks, panels, fittings — are inspected, certified where possible, and sold in bulk to contractors at prices that can run as low as one-tenth of the cost of new stock.

That economics matters. Reuse only scales if it’s cheaper, faster and more practical than ordering new materials. By bringing volume, certification and a central location into a single 5-acre hub, Yes Make and Material Cultures are betting that London builders will start choosing reclaimed by default, not just for marketing.

Not alone

London’s effort fits into a wider, slowly growing movement. In Savannah, Georgia, the 501(c)(3) Re:purpose Savannah dismantles condemned homes, dairies, cottages and bungalows by hand, then resells the bricks, beams, timber, doors and ironwork to builders working on new houses. Their lumberyard becomes a kind of architectural memory bank for the city.

The shared idea is straightforward: cities are full of high-quality materials that we keep treating as waste. With the right infrastructure, those materials can go back into the next building, and the one after that.

In Newham, that infrastructure now covers 5 acres — and London’s wood, brick and steel finally have somewhere to go besides a hole in the ground.