Renovations recently outpaced new building construction in the U.S. for the first time – great news for those concerned about climate change. The building construction industry is responsible for a hefty 13% of energy-related emissions.

Reusing our existing building stock can help us avoid significant environmentally-costly new emissions, while also providing opportunities to reduce building operating emissions through energy upgrades. It’s estimated that reusing and retrofitting existing buildings can save between 50-75% of the carbon that would be expended by constructing a similar building.

This new trend in building and infrastructure reuse, driven primarily by dramatic increases in the cost of building materials, contrasts significantly with America’s longstanding love affair with chucking out old buildings in favor of new ones. In total, we typically demolish more than a billion square feet of built space in the United States every year, the equivalent of 20% of the built area in New York City. This means that in the next 10 years, we’ll demolish (and rebuild) the equivalent of New York City…twice. In addition to those teardowns, we abandon many buildings. Though estimates are imprecise, it’s believed that, across the U.S., as many as 19 million buildings sit vacant.

Yet our appetite for space is enormous. It’s estimated that we build between four and six billion square feet of space, between residential and commercial development, in the U.S. each year. But the climate impacts of all that building – including emissions from materials manufacturing and new infrastructure – receives far less attention than it should.

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