Still, that accounts for just 0.2% of total U.S. The sector now employs some 14,500 people and keeps about 350,000 tons out of landfills annually, said Brad Guy, an architect with Material Reuse, a sustainable architecture consultancy. Revenue from deconstruction and reuse has tripled since 2008, to around $1.4 billion last year. Yet in a typical home, only between 5% and 15% of materials cannot be reused or recycled, according to the Delta Institute, a Chicago-based environmental nonprofit. Nearly two-thirds of building waste went straight to landfills. produced about 600 million tons of construction and demolition debris in 2018, more than twice its municipal solid waste, according to the most recent data from the Environmental Protection Agency. “Before doing this job, I never realized how much stuff people would throw away – and how valuable things are,” Torres said. ![]() Today the company does around one deconstruction job a week, but is planning to expand, and has just landed a grant to do 18 projects in nearby Washington over the coming five months. “You get better and figure out what’s faster, more efficient and safer,” he said. Last year, the company said, donations and in-house deconstruction crews helped keep a mountain of goods from landfills – 3,400 doors, 6.6 miles (10 km) of lumber, 74,000 square feet (7,000 square meters) of tiles and more.įormer chef and baker Luis Torres, 30, who started working with Community Forklift a year ago, said taking a building apart was often more difficult than putting it together.ĭismantling flooring is especially hard, he said – and when he first started, it would crack, but he had mastered the technique now. “It was a permanent part of the system back in the 1920s, and it has come back because of economic, environmental and social need,” he said.Ĭommunity Forklift has grown with the trend, now employing about 30 people with an annual budget of around $3 million. “Deconstruction has been scaled up, and it’s happening all over the country,” said Neil Seldman, co-founder of nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a national nonprofit that focuses on local community development. Similar proposals are being debated in Baltimore and elsewhere. San Antonio introduced a building deconstruction requirement in January, following cities such as Milwaukee in the Midwest, and Boise, Idaho, and Portland, Oregon, in the west. Since the nonprofit was founded in 2005, it has helped pioneer a model now spreading across the U.S., fueled in part by local officials keen to reduce pressure on landfill sites and bolster the economy. “But if you really want to attack the volume of stuff going into landfills, you have to do the everyday stuff,” he said, referring to the construction materials and less glamorous items that also lined the warehouse aisles. “In any building being torn down, there will almost always be some elements that are still valuable,” Community Forklift executive director Trey Davis told Context, sitting among dozens of twinkling light fixtures and marble mantles. Zero Waste Palo Alto via Thomson Reuters FoundationĬontext, which published this article, is a media platform of the Thomson Reuters Foundation that reports on the interdependent issues of climate change, the impact of technology on society and inclusive economies.ĮDMONSTON, MARYLAND – The cavernous Maryland warehouse housing Community Forklift bulges with doors, windows, flooring and light fixtures, some lightly used, some more so, but all for sale at big discounts.ĭozens of customers browsed the wares on a recent weekday morning at the East Coast store, part of a growing drive to keep building materials out of landfills and in the economy – with important climate, sustainability and social benefits. Workers took apart this commercial building as part of a deconstruction project in Palo Alto, California, in 2019.
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