Okay, everyone slips up once in a while and forgets to recycle a pop can or something, but how dumb do you have to be to throw out a whole building?! Yet it happens every day. We call it “demolition”. The very word screams ‘WASTE!’- bring in the bulldozer, push it all over and toss it in a dumpster- but it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a movement afoot called variously ‘building disassembly’, ‘deconstruction’, or ‘harvesting’.
As a rule, demolition is a profound statement of disrespect- disrespect for the material and energy which went into building a structure, disrespect for the people who built it and their aspirations, disrespect for the building’s place in the community, disrespect for the residents’ and community’s history.
According to a 1996 EPA report 245,000 houses are demolished each year around the US. That’s about 20 million tons of trash. Almost all of that material was wasted in the past, but a rigorous deconstruction can reuse or recycle over 85% of it- equal to over 220,000 houses of equivalent size. Housing starts- new house building- in the US are generally over a million per year, so this amount of material would build perhaps 20% of them.
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In the past people have thought that it was easier and cheaper to just knock it down and start over, but with direct reuse of the material, tax breaks, reduced dump fees, and sales of the salvaged parts “decon” is now seen as a much better and more responsible way to go. Jurisdictions around the nation are recognizing all this and changing regulations, nowhere more so than here. Seattle changed one part of its process and now decon is actively selected for.
Shoreline is home to a project reported all over the country. Alice Keller bought a “tear-down”, but instead of just trashing the place she had it disassembled and reused most of its part for her new (old) house!
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Nationally, the umbrella organization for this growing field is the Building Materials Reuse Association. Many structures are intended to last centuries, but for those meant for a shorter span they suggest the next stage is to design buildings up front for a building’s eventual deconstruction so the reuse/recycling rate can approach 100%. Like the rest of our products, buildings are now entering a new era of efficiency.