Un-building of the Suburbs
Near where I live, there are many towns where people buy the old homes for the land, knock down the old house, and put up something new, and usually hideously large, in its place. Some of the houses, 1960’s era ranches for example, are not difficult to see go. But when people buy older houses and demolish them, my heart breaks a little.
But in all of the cases of tear downs, there is an enormous amount of waste that seems hard to justify.
Nancy Keates from the Wall Street Journal has written about the more eco-friendly option of unbuilding, something which they are doing to their Portland, OR home.
The Building Materials Association estimates that in the U.S., 315,000 to 360,000 tons per year of reused building materials are sold by reuse centers — not even 0.2% of the total waste from building activities each year.
Keates writes about how her house was painstakingly disassembled. Things that were going to be reused in the rebuild were separated out. Once that is done, “the Rebuilding Center will send in their deconstruction crew to take everything else apart. They will start with the hardwood floors, then take apart the windows, doors and even pipes — down to the house’s foundation.”
Doing this does end up costing more money than a traditional tear-down. The unbuilding at the Keates home took an additional 2 weeks and approximately $4000. Not adding to landfills, however, priceless.