deconstruction

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.