Deconstruct Instead Demolish: A Green Job Opportunity. By John Uhl, SolveClimate, October 29, 2008. "Every year America throws away 250,000 homes. Bulldozers are knocking down almost 700 houses every day and trucks are carting the demolition debris for burial in landfills all across the country. It's estimated that 1.2 billion board feet of usable lumber ends up in the garbage, not to mention salvageable hardware, fixtures, wiring, piping, doors and windows. But a new appreciation of the value of this waste stream is leading to the growth of a nascent industry: deconstruction. In a worsening economy and in the effort to create green jobs for a low-carbon future, deconstruction could prove to be a boom industry -- if it wasn't so cheap to throw things away -- creating jobs, recycling valuable materials and recovering and reusing the energy embedded in these existing construction materials... 'Building owners who choose deconstruction can ... very regularly make up the difference in costs by donating the salvaged materials to one of more than 900 nonprofit, secondhand building-supply stores across the country, like Habitat for Humanity's ReStores. Owners then take a federal tax deduction for their value.' [NYTimes, 9/26/08]... The Times calls deconstructing a house 'a W.P.A. project in reverse: a monumental taking down of what has been built to reclaim the energy and value locked away inside.' Deconstruction has the best chance of catching on in parts of the country like Boston and Portland, where high tipping fees make demolition less economical. Maybe cities can jump-start a jobs program by doing something as simple as raising tipping fees -- making it expensive to throw things of value away, putting a true price on the cost demolition pollution."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment