Building demolition doesn’t exactly have a history as the greenest practice on Earth.  I’ll readily admit to thinking that watching a massive concrete monolith reduced to dust in a matter of seconds is one of the coolest things out there, but the problem is that dust just doesn’t tend to stay put.

Aside from simply being dirty, the demolition waste of older buildings carries all sorts of nastiness—asbestos, lead, other heavy metals, to name a few—that can be inhaled by the local populace or wildlife, or run off into the local water supply. Plus a huge pile of rubble isn’t particularly conducive to separation and recycling. 

But from the space-starved cities of Japan comes a mind-bending demolition technique that reduces footprint both in terms of surface area and ecological impact. By supporting the building with hydraulic jacks and then demolishing floor-by-floor from the bottom up, “daruma-otoshi” is as visually stunning as it is environmentally friendly. Let’s just hope the sprawled out urban ares of the United States don’t prevent it from replacing current demolition techniques on this side of the Pacific.