Commissioned when material reuse was banned in public projects, a recycling centre in Antwerp by Bovenbouw Architectuur confronts the absurdity of waste ‘Waste is a religious thing,’ says Nick Shay, the main character of Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld from 1997. ‘We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread. It is necessary to respect what we discard.’ Nick is a waste manager. In 1978, he attends a conference in the Mojave Desert. Jesse Detwiler, a ‘waste theorist whose provocations had spooked the industry’, lectures about the scenery of the future, which will be, according to him, a scenery of waste. ‘Basic household waste’, he says, ‘ought to be placed in the cities that produce it. Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Don’t hide your waste facilities. Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage.’ Despite Detwiler’s advice, waste management is rarely the remit of architecture. Incinerators, landfills and recycling centres are usually a matter of infrastructure, of machinery, or of landscapes that have been destroyed by being filled to the brim. In Belgium, this has changed in recent decades; the majority of public commissions – even those relating to waste management – are now a matter of architecture. In 2009, Antwerp‑based practice Bovenbouw Architectuur won a competition organised by the City of Antwerp for the masterplan of its recycling centres, referred to as containerparken. The very first public recycling facility in Belgium opened in 1976, next to the incinerator of the municipality of Izegem, close to the French border. It could boast of three containers: one for glass, one for metal and one for combustible household waste. At this time, garden waste was collected separately and occasionally incinerated together with fuel oil and old tyres; economy and efficiency, rather than environmental considerations, were the main motivations for selective collection. A decade of national protests against the numerous rubbish dumps and the (profitable) import of foreign waste followed. This situation started to change on a national level in 1981, when the Flemish government issued a ‘waste decree’ and established the Openbare Vlaamse Afvalstoffenmaatschappij (Public Flemish Waste Management Institution or OVAM). Since then, foreign waste has continued to be imported, but it is processed instead of dumped. Waste collection at home started to be separated, and in many Flemish cities, five categories were collected weekly or biweekly: plastics, compostable waste, paper, glass and everything else. By means of generous subvention, OVAM also encouraged every municipality to open a recycling centre – with an estimated cost of about €75,000 each. These facilities had a quadruple purpose: to prevent illegal dumping, to promote recycling, to make the population aware of waste, but also to save on energy and raw materials. Construction and demolition waste could be used for local road paving; garden and pruning waste could be composted on site; OVAM took care of all the dangerous waste while contracts with specialised firms, foreign or domestic, were necessary for all the other materials. The first recycling facility in the city of Antwerp opened in 1988; today, almost 40 years later, the city has eight container parks, and five of them have been upgraded by Bovenbouw since they won the open competition in 2009; a facility at Kielsbroek, to the west of the city and next to its main highway junction, opened at the end of 2024. The site is next to a junction of highways in an industrial zone of warehouses, set among mature trees and vegetation. The city, however, is very close: trains whizz by, and new towers of apartments are visible in the distance, as is the river Scheldt, and the petrol‑blue substation by noAarchitecten built in 2009, that supplies a large part of Antwerp with electricity. The entrance of the facility is accompanied by a building for workers, housing a reception, staff room, toilets and changing rooms. The roof is extended to form a large steel canopy supported by a large laminated‑timber beam, under which hazardous waste is stored, such as liquids, batteries or polystyrene. The building’s facades are made out of red bricks, stacked lying on their long edge, so the two holes that puncture each brick are exposed – a kind of ‘improper use’ that draws attention to the specificity and tactility of materials, a tactility shared by everything that passes through the hands of the visitors into the containers. A circular window is cut out from the outer leaves of brickwork at the corner of the building, exposing the inside of the bricks and leaving the edges raw, in a playful but also slightly brutal, DIY way, revealing the different possibilities of banal building materials. The windows offer views of a square, at the project’s centre, intended as a semi‑public meeting place. In reality, visitors are mostly concerned with their waste; an initial part of the project to organise workshops and infosessions – about, for example, composting – has been dropped by the city. Opposite the long building, the square is demarcated by a row of containers and their retaining walls, made out of prefabricated concrete elements, that can be, so the architects argue, disassembled and reused later. An existing height difference in the terrain was preserved: the containers are set into this lower level – accessible only to lorries that come to collect the waste – and visitors are able to drop rubbish into them from the higher square without having to climb a stepladder. Yellow numbers for the containers, hung high on a steel structure with vertical tube lights, indicate what belongs where. The visitor circulation – for cars, although nothing prevents you from arriving by cargo bike – was duplicated to allow for two circuits: one free and one paid‑for (for rubble and combustible waste), accessible via a weighbridge. Once on the square, however, it is easy to switch between the two zones (and, for example, to deliver combustible waste without paying), which is why it was recently decided to send everyone past the weighbridge. The container park does not escape surveillance, and compared with other Belgian cities, everything in Antwerp is strictly regulated. It is, for example, forbidden to take other people’s waste home with you, even if it is still perfectly usable, although the option to put things aside for charity shops is offered. The new Kielsbroek recycling centre was a slow process. In the proposed concept from 2012, the architects explained that they wanted to favour ‘creativity and craftmanship’ over ‘industrial production’. At the same time, they regretted ‘the ban on the reuse of material in a public tender’, which is why they decided to ‘use as much ecological building material as possible,’ (wood insulated with cellulose, for example, or OSB with reduced formaldehyde), ‘without resorting to literal reuse’. Bovenbouw is currently participating in competitions for containerparken elsewhere and, according to founder Dirk Somers, they will pursue ecological standards and approaches more strictly. Thanks to the pioneering work of specialist Belgian design practice Rotor, the legislation in the country has changed: since 2020, the principles of the circular economy are encouraged. The guidelines no longer stipulate the exclusive use of new materials; recycled or reused components have become more accessible and less expensive. For reasons of continuity, however, but also because the client preferred a smooth and efficient process, the starting points of the masterplan from 2012 were preserved. The project replaces an older and smaller facility, a few hundred metres away, from which some elements were reused, such as the storage volumes for chemical materials. Bovenbouw’s material and organisational approach in Kielsbroek – but also at the four other locations – makes it possible to get to know your garbage, as DeLillo’s character phrased it; the contents of the open containers are visible, and although the building’s materials are not recycled or reused, they are conspicuously presented as ‘materials’. It is a space in which to confront that weird and ultimately absurd activity of recycling. Why, after all, bother acquiring something that you have to throw away later anyway? Recycling, in this sense, is what continues to enable production and consumerism. This is how Slavoj Žižek expresses it in his recent book Against Progress: ‘The ecological dream‑notion of total recycling (in which every remainder is used again)’ is ‘the ultimate capitalist dream.’ At the same time, the optimisation of recycling is equally dependent on the industry. Most of the waste in Kielsbroek travels to the port of Antwerp‑Bruges, which also houses the largest chemical cluster in Europe. The private firm Indaver processes approximately five million tons of waste annually, coming from large‑scale factories, public authorities (such as the city of Antwerp), but also from other waste companies, including those from abroad. Indaver has 2,300 collaborators all over Europe, and achieved a turnover in 2023 of €871 million. At the Hooge Maey, some 20km north of Kielsbroek, a 1960s landfill closed in 2018; a new one close by is still in use, while rubbish continues to be destroyed at high temperature in rotary kilns. ‘How’s the waste business?’ someone asks Nick in Underworld. His reply: ‘Booming. The waste business. Bigger by the minute.’ 2025-05-19 Christophe Van Gerrewey Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now