Deconstruct Instead of Demolish: A Green Job Opportunity

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.

The New York Times Magazine followed around a deconstruction crew involved in the painstaking, labor-intensive work led by Brad Guy, a "journeyman architectural academic" who is supervising the deconstruction of two homes in Cleveland, one of the cities hardest hit by the subprime mortgage crisis. The city of Cleveland is expecting to spend $9 million in the next year demolishing 1,100 of its 8,000 vacant homes. It's a $9 million expenditure that is largely headed headed straight for the dump.

What if that money could be put to more productive use? It's a question Cleveland is exploring by helping to fund Guy's experiment in deconstruction -- to determine whether the cost of the labor required to deconstruct some of these homes would be offset by the value of the material the labor recovers. The short answer appears to be yes.

With the assistance of an inexperienced crew, Guy is able to reclaim "cabinets with lead-filigreed doors, 108-year-old oak flooring, mammoth joists of old-growth pine that had run for 24 feet along the width of the second house." Guy projects that "even a modestly more adept crew could have diverted about 76 percent of each house from a landfill, salvaging more than $20,000 of material in all."

Deconstruction isn't easy work, and it doesn't come naturally to Guy's crew, many of whom had never heard of deconstruction before they arrived on the job:

Guy’s crew of three women and four men fanned out that first morning to harvest 6538 Lederer’s windows, doors and moldings, battling screws stripped decades ago by some careless do-it-yourselfer or cemented under generations of varnish and grime. There was a lot of unsure improvisation, putting down one tool and trying another.

On the back porch, two men pried at opposite sides of a six-paned window. (They were hired through a program that trains public-housing residents for green-collar jobs; others came via Hard Hatted Women, a nonprofit preparing women for construction work with technical training, math classes and weight lifting.) The men shattered one pane. Then they split the wooden frame. “Hit it more,” one told the other. By the time they got it free, it was worthless and had to be thrown out. It would be another full day before one of these men pulled a co-worker aside and asked her: “What exactly is deconstruction? What’s going to be left when we finish this?” When she told him there would be nothing left, he still didn’t believe her, so he asked around.

As the days go by, the crew continues struggling against the concept at the root of their work: "the workers still didn’t seem to internalize the totality of their job — that 'the whole house means the whole house,' as Guy put it." Their resistance becomes emblematic of just how customary it has become to throw away what, with a little work, could be saved, and hints at the obstacles that stand in the way of taking up deconstructing on a large-scale basis.

Of course there is another obstacle in the way of our reusing our homes, rather than discarding them, which is money. Basically, it's less expensive to bulldoze. Deconstruction is more labor intensive than demolition, and it takes longer. The use of wrecking crews to hand-salvage building material was once more common, but the use of cheaper material since World War II has made the infrastructure of many houses less worth salvaging. As the article points out, though, faster doesn't always mean less expensive. In the last ten years, as landfills have run out of space, the tipping fees paid to landfills have been rising across much of the country, making it more expensive discard demolition debris. What's more:

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. One [project] 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 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.

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