Earth Equity News

This Old Recyclable House. By Jon Mooallem, NYTimesMag. September 28, 2008. "Brad Guy is... the president of the Building Material Reuse Association, a nonprofit in Pittsburgh that supports the fledgling deconstruction industry. He has spent the last 14 years as a journeyman architectural academic, conducting meticulous studies on how to efficiently dismantle the American house to reuse its materials instead of just clobbering it with a backhoe and sweeping it into a landfill... A quarter of a million homes are demolished annually, according to the E.P.A., liberating some 1.2 billion board feet of reusable lumber alone. For the most part, this wood has been trucked out to a landfill and buried. Remodeling actually ends up generating more than one and a half times the amount of debris every year that demolishing homes does. (America generates a total of 160 million tons of construction and demolition debris every year, 60 percent of which is landfilled.) The Stanford archaeologist William Rathje, who spent decades excavating landfills, has estimated that construction and demolition debris, together with paper, account for 'well over half' of what America throws out... At the same time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, new construction consumes 60 percent of all materials used in the nation's economy every year, excluding food and fuel. Few of those resources are renewable. Older homes are among the last repositories of old-growth timber, like heart pine or cypress, and keeping even the most mundane building materials in circulation at the end of a house's life preserves their 'embodied energy' (the energy expended producing and shipping natural resources in the first place) instead of drawing new resources to replace them."