During the deconstruction of a building, a team carefully removes reusable materials from homes and businesses instead of demolishing them and throwing them in landfills. Those reclaimed materials are then re-sold at a discount to the public.
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Deconstruction in the Valley keeps materials from landfills, saves homeowners money
During the deconstruction of a building, a team carefully removes reusable materials from homes and businesses instead of demolishing them and throwing them in landfills. Those reclaimed materials are then re-sold at a discount to the public.
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Kudos to Stardust for taking initiative in the deconstruction world and making such a significant difference on the landfill waste in Arizona. I had no idea prior to reading this article that it could be a thing to keep materials from a demolition. Perhaps it’s been instilled in me that during a renovation, that the previous installments get trashed (this idea must have stemmed from watching hours and hours of HGTV as a kid, where they insert clips of dumping demolished pieces into dumpsters). The fact that Stardust, a single company in a single state, has prevented 80,000,000 pounds of salvageable material from the landfill is such a big deal. Imagine if other organizations in all 50 states did the same— that would be 4 BILLION pounds prevented. I think this process is incredible and should be advertised heavily to influence around the country and the world. It does make me sad that we don’t reuse like this here at CMU drama—I mentioned this in another article comment as well. In my 3 months that I’ve been here, I’ve seen so much ‘scrap’ wood and masonite thrown into the dumpster, that could’ve very well been used for other things. Perhaps not another big build, but why don’t we keep a closet of smaller material that the students can use for smaller projects? Food for thought regarding sustainability in the theatre.
I have read about other companies that do this same thing. I think it is a growing industry that has developed out of the realization that many, if not most things that get demolished and sent to the landfill are still useful. I would guess that homeowners frequently bring items to reuse centers from their deconstruction projects, but those items are not actually useful either because they are too damaged or just not something that is needed. There is a need for professionals who are in touch with the types of things that are in demand at reuse centers, who can deconstruct carefully and generate reusable materials. In Pittsburgh, Construction Junction has a crew that does that exact task, but there are companies that only do the resale part of the operation. Another useful part of the skilled deconstruction industry is the fact that it is a slower process than demolition, so it generates more work hours and probably more jobs.
Oh this is awesome! There were many things in this article that I simply didn't know about, two of the biggest things being that "more than 500 million tons of construction and demolition materials goes into landfills every year, and more than half of that is reusable", and also that there are companies out there that do deconstruction. I can't believe that so much of what is normally demolished is still usable, and is normally just completely trashed. I think it's wonderful that this company, and hopefully other like them, are doing such great work to make sure that not only do these things not end up in a landfill, but that they are also going to help out homeowners trying to finish or re-do their houses at discounted prices for these recycled items. I do wonder how many hours it takes to deconstruct a house, and how they manage to keep the cost so low when they surely have to pay a great number of people to carefully extract these items. It must be worth it though, and certainly the impact on the environment cannot be disputed.
I like this trend as it relates to theater, because it seems like this is an idea that Theater got right first, and then another industry is catching on. I know that reuse isn't anything new, but it has been a core value and goal of regional and community theatre for decades. We "strike" our shows in such a way as to save the most of the virgin building materials from a show as possible, in order to reuse them on the next show. As we have somewhat learned with David Boevers' Green project, Theatre as an industry , at least on the regional level, is one of the greener industries around. Considering our focus on reuse, which is honestly more of an economic need rather than a concern for the environment. I'm glad to see thst instinct for reuse actually reaching the construction and remodeling industry. Especially when the materials are then available to purchase by the public. I know that the next time I need materials for a home project or something of the sort, I'll head over to my local and convenient Construction Junction and pick something up.
During the endless research of green scenery fabrication project, I found out that materials usually have much longer usage times in other industries such as construction and interior business. But also the other fact is that scale wise theater is consuming so little of the portion that it is so hard to make a reasonable comparison or application to the green laws or codes that were made for construction material usage. But that is when this kind of reusable materials resources come in handy. Though it would be harder for Carnegie SOD to source our materials from this type of warehouse, but on smaller scaled projects like class assignments, we can definitely put them into good use. We had our own tradition of making use of the shop waste materials, so I would give us a pretty good score on recycling. The next and bigger move would possibly be establishing a tighter network with local schools and theaters for reusable materials exchanging.
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