[ Page 1 of 8 ]

By Barbara Knecht

Continuing Education Use the following learning objectives to focus your study while reading this month’s ARCHITECTURAL RECORD / AIA Continuing Education article. Learning Objective: After reading this article, you will be able to: 1. List problems associated with disassembling buildings. 2. Discuss current and future incentives for reusing and recycling building materials. 3. Describe benefits of designing for disassembly and deconstruction.

It’s the right thing to do. Recycle, reuse, reduce. Experts and advocates spout convincing statistics about how construction waste and demolition debris (C&D) chokes our landfills and harms the environment. In the U.S. and Western Europe, a half ton of construction waste and demolition debris is produced per capita annually. The fact that the U.S. demolition industry takes down 200,000 buildings every year explains why activities related to the built environment generate 30 to 40 percent of all waste.

Experts also say that instead of demolishing a building and dumping the remains in landfills, we should reuse and recycle old building materials. This practice has a long history. Roman and Greek columns and capitals showed up in buildings built by successors all over ancient Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Today, houses throughout the U.S. contain the recycled lumber of dismantled structures. It is only in the last half century that this country abandoned the art of recovery and reuse for the expediency, predictability, and standardization resulting from complete demolition and new construction.

Does it make economic sense? There is a lot conspiring against it. Building components are difficult to separate without damaging them; salvaged materials have low value; buildings are rife with hazardous materials; and equipment, transportation, and disassembly time and labor are costly.

Bob Brickner, senior vice president at Gershman, Brickner & Bratton (GBB), a solid-waste management company in Fairfax, Virginia, dates the increased attention on C&D waste back about 15 years. His company wrote an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)–funded manual on recycling and diversion of C&D waste in 1993 (www.swana.org).

 

At the Phoenix C&D Recycling Facility in Des Moines, demolition waste is loaded on the screening deck and conveyor. Sorters inspect their picks and drop them into nearby bins. Photography: Courtesy Robert Brickner/GBB

Demolition contractors have always been salvagers to the degree that it does not interfere with clearing a site as fast as possible. Thus, they prioritize big, bulky, and valuable items, such as structural steel, followed by materials that are easily recovered, such as glass and concrete. Demolition contractors have knowledge of the market and the value of salvaged materials but have never been in the position to influence an energy-efficient demolition process. Their charge has been to get it off the site and out of sight.

In the last decade, however, new incentives have emerged to divert more types of materials from demolition into the reuse-and-recycling market. Existing landfills have reached capacity, and new ones are hard to locate and permit. Tipping fees have risen, especially for hazardous materials, and the LEED scoring system encourages waste diversion. “These factors have boosted the market for materials separation and, in turn, the growing market has brought the entrepreneurs and equipment engineers to increase receiving markets and develop better handling methods, both of which improve cost-effectiveness,” says Brickner.