Deconstruction

This 7 page New York Times article is very informative of the situation occurring now. It's about the battle between actual deconstructing and demolition. Here are the important parts I want to remember:

“Guy estimates that maybe as few as 300 homes were fully deconstructed in America last year.”

"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. He called it one of a few “big-ticket items” in the waste stream actually worthy of the debates we have over merely “symbolic targets” like disposable diapers."

"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."

"Building owners who choose deconstruction can, however, 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. One of Guy’s first projects showed that after that tax deduction the average cost of deconstructing six homes around Gainesville, Fla., was 37 percent less than the average cost of demolition. On one house, deconstruction beat demolition by $8,000."

"The demolition industry has identified 14 recyclable building materials, he told me, but it only recycles three in any real volume: concrete, metal and wood."

"Jeff Byles notes that up to this point there was a lucrative-enough salvage market in place that wreckers regularly paid building owners, not the other way around. By 1930, however, the industry titan Albert Volk’s men no longer had the time for cleaning and reselling bricks. Bathtubs that used to resell for $25 each, Volk said, were now being smashed up and sent “sail[ing] out through the Narrows on Father Knickerbocker’s trash-carrying scows to find a well-earned rest at the bottom of the sea.”

"Two changes had happened simultaneously: wreckers were replaced by machines, and builders were reduced to cogs in one. The modern house is now made of stuff less worth saving and torn down in a way that makes saving it a hassle."

“The only constant is change,” Guy told me. Cities sprawl and contract. Old structures are torn down to clear space for modern ones. The average American moves more than 11 times in a lifetime. The average American house is only 32 years old, Guy said. “Clearly there are a whole bunch of things we should be doing better,” he said. “The bottom line is, we demolish the hell out of our country.”

"hand-disassembling 60 percent of a typical house cost virtually the same amount as dumping that same portion of it into a landfill. The value of the salvaged goods you ended up with would be almost pure profit."

“Deconstruction is the right way to go. It does, however, have to become more efficient and cost-effective” if it is going to join demolition as “the way we do business.” And there, really, was deconstruction’s quandary: things that don’t work yet rarely get institutionalized.