Rob Neville has spent more than 25 years working on construction sites and has become all too familiar with the amount of material wasted by the industry.
His experience prompted him to establish Revival Projects with his wife, Stephanie, in Melbourne in 2016. The social enterprise is a sustainable building practice that works exclusively with existing materials.
After moving to Lyttelton two years ago with their sons, Cooper and Fred, the couple are bringing the same approach to Christchurch through Ōtautahi Tree Recovery, an urban tree salvage initiative that became operational at Ferrymead Heritage Park in May.
Its core mission is to make it possible to salvage and utilise trees from across the city.
In its first six months, the initiative has salvaged 66 trees, avoiding 187 tonnes of embodied carbon – the equivalent of taking 41 cars off the road for a year.
“People often don’t realise how massive and immediate the environmental impact can be just from using what already exists,” Neville said.
The Christchurch operation builds on the couple’s experience establishing Urban Tree Recovery in Melbourne, which gave businesses and community groups access to timber from trees felled across the city.
The initiative quickly gained momentum.
“What we found was that the moment we made that infrastructure and process accessible, organisations in the community immediately were excited to engage with it,” he said.
The project won the City of Melbourne Award for Sustainability in 2024.
The couple had been working towards bringing the concept to Christchurch for two years. They met with the city council throughout last year to share their vision and received the green light from Ferrymead Heritage Park in January to establish the operation.
Education is another part of the initiative, with Neville talking to school groups about the salvage process and its environmental benefits.
Several projects are already under way, including one involving 20 trees scheduled to be felled at Papanui Domain.
The couple are looking at ways to incorporate the salvaged timber into lesson plans at Papanui High School.
They also salvaged a large gum tree that had to be removed to make way for a community garden in Diamond Harbour.
The tree’s removal initially met resistance from the community. Neville is now turning the milled timber into vegetable beds, plant boxes and furniture for the garden, giving it a new purpose.
“That sense of connection that the community have with trees is so powerful,” he said.
“Being able to give that timber a new chapter and the community be able to maintain that sense of connection through that next chapter of the tree’s life is extremely meaningful.”
The couple also established an existing-materials consultancy in Melbourne in 2022, helping developers and designers understand the commercial feasibility and environmental benefits of reusing materials already on their sites.
Neville hopes to establish a similar consultancy in Christchurch to help bring projects to life using existing resources.
But he believes meaningful reform in the construction industry will require policy changes.
“Something we’ve always pushed for is that there’s an expectation, a requirement as part of the consenting process, to handle that resource in a responsible way,” he said.
“It seems crazy to me that once you’ve got the consent to demolish a house, there’s no next layer of responsibility that’s incorporated in the consent process as to how you handle those resources.”
Just four months after Ōtautahi Tree Recovery started operating, three burglars stole $35,000 of equipment. The operation has continued with tools donated by the community.
Neville came into work one morning and discovered the break-in and that the burglary was still in progress.
He and a worker from Goldfield Stone, another business at the park, tried to catch them red handed but were unsuccessful.
They have held off repurchasing all their stolen equipment in the hopes police will be able to recover them.
Carpentry runs in Neville’s family. His father, Jeff, and grandfather, Fred, both worked in the trade.
Born in Cornwall in England, Neville moved to Christchurch with his family while he was at primary school. He remembers regularly helping his father with small building projects as a child.
“(I had) a lot of exposure to that and that felt really natural in terms of the right trade for me,” he said.
He grew up in a family that valued resourcefulness, helping shape his passion for sustainability.
“We would always make the most of things and avoid waste and look after things,” he said.
After finishing at Christchurch Boys’ High School, Neville completed an apprenticeship with Leighs Construction. Around that time, he met Stephanie, who was studying photography at the Design and Arts College.
The couple spent time in Lyttelton early in their relationship, including a year working on the restoration of the former Lyttelton Post Office on Norwich Quay.
After completing his apprenticeship, Neville and Stephanie moved to London for four years. Working on heritage projects, including historic buildings such as Oxford University student halls, deepened his appreciation for preserving existing structures.
They returned to Christchurch for a few months before the February 22, 2011, earthquake severly damaged their home in Chester St East.
Stephanie was in the lounge at home when the earthquake struck, causing the chimney to come down through the roof.
She was able to avoid the chimney bricks falling through the lounge ceiling and escaped unharmed.
Neville was working on a building site on Moorhouse Ave, restoring a heritage building damaged in the September 2010 earthquake.
He was on the fourth of five levels of scaffolding, drilling core holes with another contractor, when the earthquake hit. The top floor came down on them and the stairs collapsed.
Neville lay on a scaffolding plank until the shaking stopped. Relatively unscathed, he managed to crawl out, climb down the framework and walk across the city to meet Stephanie.
“I saw immediately how bad it was, so it was just a sigh of relief to find Steph and get out of the city,” he said.
Soon afterwards, a friend suggested they would like Melbourne. They took his advice and relocated.
The move would prove pivotal in Neville’s sustainability journey.
One day, after returning home from restoring a historic pub in Fitzroy, Stephanie told him she had spotted an old window frame dumped down the road.
Neville wheeled it home on his skateboard and turned it into a table. It was the first piece of furniture he had made from discarded materials, and it still sits in their Lyttelton home today.
He went on to gain his builders licence and take on projects of his own, but became increasingly uncomfortable with the waste that had become commonplace in the industry.
“I found it quite distressing, you know, being part of an industry and process where good resources are very often thrown away and new resources are brought in because that’s the easiest and cheapest and fastest way that we do things,” he said.
“It’s become normalised to actually be quite indulgent and quite wasteful in construction.”
About 5.25 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste goes to New Zealand landfills every year, making up about 69% of all landfill waste.
Neville regularly challenged wasteful practices on projects he worked on, suggesting to structural engineers and furniture makers that existing materials be reused. But he often met resistance.
“Often they just didn’t want to know about it,” he said.
In 2016, Neville and Stephanie turned that frustration into action, establishing Revival Projects to help change how the industry handled resources.
“Utilising existing resources and making the most of what we already have is the most immediate and impactful way that we can be more sustainable in our projects,” he said.
The business took on adaptive reuse projects, helping clients incorporate existing structures and materials into new designs and developments.
When Covid-19 hit in 2020, Neville said people became more receptive to alternative ideas. The couple seized the opportunity, pitching large-scale reuse projects to developers and designers across Melbourne.
They launched Zero Footprint Repurposing hubs in Melbourne in 2020 and 2022. The hubs store demolition materials so designers, architects and manufacturers can reuse them in future projects.
The second hub’s launch won the Melbourne Design Week Award for best event.
In 2023, they also launched Revival Cooperative, a free app that brings the community together to prevent waste and divert materials from landfill.