A new grey-brick building with a gritty, almost worn-out facade now sits at the corner of 47th Street and Eleventh Avenue. If it weren’t for the top half made of glass, the building would look like it’s been sitting here for decades. That’s because the bricks aren’t new, at least not exactly.

The brick facade of The West, a new condo building with 219 residences, is made up of almost 580,000 pounds of demolition and industrial waste. Created by Dutch company StoneCycling, the recycled bricks contain 60% waste, including ceramic toilet bowls, roof tiles, and steel. Most bricks are made up of two to three waste streams, although the company works with 60 waste streams overall.

The West was designed by Concrete, the Dutch architecture firm behind Citizen M hotels in New York, London, and Amsterdam. This is their first time working with StoneCycling’s  “WasteBasedBricks”—and the first time the bricks have been used in the U.S.—but the architects are drawing on a strong legacy of Dutch brick building. “The canal houses in Amsterdam are all built by brick,” says Erikjan Vermeulen, a founding partner at Concrete. “We have a big brick tradition and history.”

The architects used the bricks on the first seven floors of the building’s facade, and inside the lobby, where some bricks protrude just enough from the wall to spell out a poem about Hell’s Kitchen in morse code. From up close, every brick looks different. Some are smooth, others look and feel like sandpaper, others have tiny little craters on their surface, like samples from the moon. Each brick was brushed (by hand) with a thin, slightly reflective coating of glass particles, which gives the surface an ever-so-subtle shine, particularly when the sun hits the facade.

Concrete chose recycled bricks because their imperfect look makes them appear historically accurate, which helps the building blend in with its surroundings. “This area has such a bumpy and rough history,” says Vermeulen. “It’s industrial, so we felt we wanted to create a connection to both a little bit of the past and the future.”

Traditional bricks are made with clay (in Amsterdam, for example, it’s dredged from the city’s canals) and fired in kilns. The process is very energy-intensive and calls for a lot of extracted materials. StoneCycling bricks use less extracted materials, and one of the waste streams also has a lower melting point, so the bricks can be fired at a lower temperature, says Ward Massa, the company’s cofounder. (To lower their carbon footprint, the company is also planning to switch from natural gas to hydro-oxygen to power their kilns.)

The waste streams themselves drive the hues and textures of each collection: tones range from “nougat” to “pistachio” to “salt+pepper.” To create the color of the bricks used in The West, which the company describes as “truffle,” Massa says they had to add a waste stream from the steel industry. “When you work with waste, it’s never one color,” he says. “It’s like a chef in the kitchen.” (Some drive-through Starbucks locations in Europe feature StoneCycling bricks speckled with white; those are made from crushed toilet bowls.)….”