Nothing lasts forever. Even with the up to 40 year life-expectancy of infrared radiant heating devices, like nearly everything, eventually they will wear out. And it might not be the heaters that fail. It might well be that the building itself needs to be demolished, or a major renovation results in a great deal of interior demo. Salvaging still useful parts of a building is a great new trend. This aspect of demolition may be more precisely called “disassembly,” where anything reusable or recyclable is kept intact and used elsewhere, or transformed into new things, rather than just packed into a landfill. This is referred to as ‘cradle-to-cradle’ approach. And Ducoterra infrared radiant heating panels have been way ahead of the cradle-to-cradle curve.
Ducoterra infrared heating panels are easily dismounted from the ceiling by removing a maximum of eight bolts or screws (depending on panel size,) and three wires. Once removed, the panel can be easily broken down into four readily recycled components: the aluminum ‘box,’ the steel back, and the sheet of aerogel insulation and wire element inside. So, either decades after, or when the building or some part of it is being demolished, it will take very little time, effort, and energy to return a panel’s materials back into usable components for new, useful items going forward.
What this means, in terms of sustainability, is that a cradle-to-cradle product remains sustainable even after it is no longer useful in its current form. This mimics what nature itself does. Rather than producing waste as an ultimate end product, it produces resources in a closed loop cycle where there is never any actual waste. A dead leaf, for example, becomes food for small organisms, which, in turn, become food for larger organisms and the cycle continues.
see also: Part 1: Definition of Terms | Part 2: Environmental Impacts | Part 3: Embodied Carbon | Part 4: Installation Impact
Part 5: Operational Emissions| Part 6: Installation Impact | Part 7: Resilience