Recycle When You Remodel

When my wife and I put an addition on our house, we hired an architect to:

• create imaginative spaces and
• act as a referee when my wife and I, shall we say, fell out of harmony in our home-improvement decisions.

Best move we made, hiring Wally Orfield in Minneapolis. He did well, plus he reminded us about recycling.

We were lathered up, really into the rip-and-pitch-it mode, when Wally asked: “What about those kitchen cabinets? Pitch them or keep them and add new paint and hardware?”

What a concept, to recycle! Save the landfills—and save mucho moola. We kept the cabinets and a long, maple counter that we replaced with laminate; rather than junk it, we used it for an office desk.

The point of this parable is to recycle when you remodel. Did you know that 85 to 90 percent of materials thrown out can be recycled? According to the Florida-based Deconstruction Institute, destructing buildings in the United States annually generates 124,670,000 tons of debris. That waste would be comparable to a wall 4,993 miles long, 30 ft. high and 30 ft. thick, that could surround the entire coast of the continental United States.

Why recycle during a remodel?
When remodeling a home, there is often a large amount of construction waste. This amounts to 136 million tons of waste annually, according to the EPA, which in turn makes up 20 percent of the waste in landfills. Green remodeling focuses on reducing this waste during remodeling and reusing materials whenever possible. Again, you can recycle 85 to 90 percent of materials thrown out.

Recycling benefits the environment by conserving energy and natural resources, reducing air and water pollution and decreasing greenhouse-gas emissions. By reducing emissions, recycling helps reduce the effects of global warming.

What can you recycle?
You can recycle a number of items at job sites, including lumber, drywall, metal, cardboard, cans and bottles. Other recyclable remodeling products include plastic, glass, batteries, and some cabinets, doors, windows and roofs. Remodelers can also recycle most sinks and tubs.

Recyclable products from construction and demolition waste from job sites can include concrete, dirt and plant materials. Contractors can haul concrete to recycling plants, which ground it down into gravel or base rock for use in future building projects. Unpainted wood can be ground down and mixed in with existing soil to help it nourish plants and tree roots. Remodelers can also recycle pallets, fluorescent tubes, cardboard and paper packaging and architectural drawings.

Demolishing vs. remodeling
Let’s look at a typical, 2,000-sq. ft. house, as an example. If demolished, it would create 10,000 cubic ft. of debris, or 127 tons. Although the cost of disposal varies depending on location, an average of $25 per ton of waste would total $3,175 for demolition of a residence, according to The National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI).

However, if a house were remodeled instead of demolished, the owners would divert 80 percent of the waste that a demolition would incur, and would save about $2,540 in disposal costs. Deconstructing an average wood frame house of 2,000 sq. ft. could produce 6,000 board ft. of reusable lumber.

If lumber is salvaged from older buildings and reused, it can provide affordable materials for remodeling or constructing new buildings. Approximately every 3 sq. ft. of lumber saved from an older structure can become 1 sq. ft. of a new residence. If deconstruction became the new residential demolition, contractors could use recovered wood to build 120,000 new affordable homes annually. This could save 33 mature trees and 10 acres of pine planted annually, which occupy the size of seven football fields.

Conserving energy
Recycling building materials also conserves energy. “Embodied energy” is the total amount of energy expended during the creation of a building and the products that comprise it, according to the Deconstruction Institute. The amount of embodied energy contained in an average, 2,000-sq.-ft. home is 892 million BTUs, the equivalent of 7,826 gallons of gasoline, enough embodied energy to drive an SUV 5.5 times around the earth.

Extracting raw materials from the earth consumes more energy than converting many old building materials into new, and using recycled products instead of manufacturing new ones can decrease energy consumption for steel about 50 percent and for plastic more than 90 percent. A 2,000-sq.-ft. home contains about 4,700 pounds of steel and 770 pounds of recyclable plastics. If carefully deconstructed and recycled into new products, they can preserve 59 million BTUs of embodied energy, equal to about 513 gallons of gasoline.

About 5 million tons of carbon equivalent are annually released into the atmosphere as methane gas. This is the result of burying about 33 million tons of wood from demolition and construction debris in landfills and anaerobic microorganisms decomposing the lumber. This is the equivalent of emissions from 3,736,000 passenger cars.

Total greenhouse gas reduction from recycling the 5,174 pounds of steel and 1,830 pounds of plastic in an average single family home would be equal to the yearly absorption of carbon dioxide by 114 trees.

For each ton of wood that remodelers reuse, they avoid creating 60 pounds of greenhouse gases from the development of raw lumber into a usable form for building.

One more time: You can recycle 85 to 90 percent of materials thrown out. So, recycle when you remodel.