After every major earthquake, Colombia repeats the same routine: assess the damage, demolish on a massive scale, haul thousands of tons of rubble to the outskirts and build from scratch. At CHAB Arquitectos we propose breaking that cycle with Post-Seismic Circular Reconstruction (RCPS, by its Spanish initials), a model that treats every damaged building as a bank of usable materials and orders decisions with a simple rule: diagnose before demolishing.
What if, after the next big earthquake, Colombia treated its wounded buildings as mines of materials?
A script repeated with every tremor
By: Carlos H. Arias
The script that follows a strong earthquake in Colombia has been predictable and costly. Emergency agencies assess the damage, machines demolish en masse, dump trucks haul thousands of tons of rubble to the outskirts of the city, and builders start over from scratch. That linear model follows the logic of «extract, build and discard»: we take raw materials from nature, raise buildings with them and, when a tremor strikes them, everything ends up in a debris dump.
That script is becoming obsolete. Facing the country’s permanent seismic threat, Colombian architecture and engineering propose a deep shift: seeing damaged buildings as material banks, that is, as stocks of usable resources that have already paid their environmental cost and can still serve.
Trading rubble for opportunities
That is why, at CHAB Arquitectos, we propose taking up the strategic model known as Post-Seismic Circular Reconstruction (RCPS), which several authors have studied in recent years. The proposal holds that, before sending heavy machinery to tear down a structure, one principle must come first: diagnose before demolishing.
The starting point is blunt: «A building affected by an earthquake is not automatically waste. It retains concrete, steel, masonry, embodied energy and infrastructure that can be repaired or reinforced to safely extend its useful life». One term in that sentence deserves a pause: embodied energy refers to all the energy and emissions already invested in manufacturing and transporting a building’s materials, an environmental capital that unnecessary demolition sends straight to the trash.
When demolition proves unavoidable for safety reasons, the model proposes replacing indiscriminate destruction with selective dismantling. In practice, crews take the building apart in stages and separate at the source, meaning they sort materials such as windows, pipes, wood, aluminum and concrete right on site, returning them to the productive cycle. With that procedure, rubble stops overwhelming local dumps.
Colombia has the tools, but lacks coordination
Colombia is not starting from zero. The country has a solid legal framework for this leap. The earthquake-resistant construction code (NSR-10) sets the technical rules for buildings to withstand tremors. Law 1523 of 2012 organizes the national disaster risk management policy. Resolution 472 of 2017, a pioneer in the region, requires managing and reusing Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW), the technical name for building rubble.
The real challenge lies in connecting these policies, which today operate as independent islands: each agency applies its own rule separately, and the opportunities of circular reconstruction get lost in the gaps between them.
The RCPS model draws on the international vision Build Back Circular, which researchers Sultan Çetin and Julian Kirchherr developed after the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes that struck Türkiye in 2023 and published in 2025 in the journal Circular Economy and Sustainability. This perspective holds that urban recovery after a disaster must produce buildings that are safer in the next earthquake and, at the same time, cities with a smaller carbon footprint and lower consumption of raw materials. Circular reconstruction also opens a labor front: selective dismantling and material recycling create green jobs that traditional demolition does not.
The hierarchy of the new paradigm
For municipalities and risk management authorities, the proposal sets a clear decision rule when intervening in an affected property:
- Preserve in situ. Prioritize repair and structural reinforcement on site, whenever technique and safety allow it.
- Reuse and recover. Dismantle in an orderly way to rescue intact pieces when there is partial collapse.
- Process the rubble, for example by crushing concrete, to produce aggregates, the granular material that serves as the base for new works.
- Dispose in debris dumps. The last option, reserved for material that no longer admits any use.
Facing a landscape of climate change and growing resource scarcity, post-seismic reconstruction in Colombia is bound to evolve. Innovating in this sector will mean that, the next time the earth shakes, our cities rise stronger and also more sustainable.
In short, Post-Seismic Circular Reconstruction proposes treating every earthquake-damaged building as a bank of materials. The operating rule orders decisions in four steps: repair when it is safe, dismantle selectively when demolition proves unavoidable, recycle the rubble as aggregates for new works and send to debris dumps only the material that is beyond use. Colombia already has the necessary rules; the pending challenge is to connect them so the next reconstruction is safe and sustainable.
References
Çetin, S. y Kirchherr, J. (2025). The Build Back Circular Framework: Circular Economy Strategies for Post-Disaster Reconstruction and Recovery. Circular Economy and Sustainability, 5(3), 1689-1726. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-024-00495-y
CHAB Arquitectos. (2026). Reconstrucción Circular Post-Sísmica [Publicación]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/share/19Cgab7fQt/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Congreso de la República de Colombia. (2012). Ley 1523 de 2012, por la cual se adopta la política nacional de gestión del riesgo de desastres y se establece el Sistema Nacional de Gestión del Riesgo de Desastres. Diario Oficial 48.411.
Ministerio de Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible. (2017). Resolución 472 de 2017, por la cual se reglamenta la gestión integral de los residuos generados en las actividades de construcción y demolición (RCD).
Ministerio de Ambiente, Vivienda y Desarrollo Territorial. (2010). Reglamento Colombiano de Construcción Sismo Resistente NSR-10 (Decreto 926 de 2010).