Recycle North touts deconstruction

By Eve Thorsen
Correspondent
Friday, October 25, 2002

It's better to take apart a building and use it again than to demolish it: That's what a crew from Recycle North is hoping to show after beginning work this week on the practical part of a national study.

Thursday morning, the eight-man crew began deconstructing the first of two ranch style houses they will work on over four to five weeks. With the siding stripped from one side of the house already, Sherman Plumley carefully hammered out sheets of ply-board sheathing from framework while Mike Mashteare rapidly removed nails with a specially developed tool.

The result will be piles of different building materials that the crew will take back to Recycle North's Building Materials Center in Burlington to be sold for reuse or use in a non-profit project, such as one sponsored by Habitat for Humanity.

The alternative method will be used by contractor Ray Piche, who will move in with an excavator and dump truck after the deconstruction is complete. Piche plans to take no more than three days to remove the two houses next door.

Recycle North believes pitting one method against the other will provide compelling evidence that deconstruction is the better of the two.

"We're hoping we can show we can compete successfully even though we're paying more people, because it costs less in equipment costs and less in dumping costs," said Tom Longstreth, Recycle North's executive director.

The two projects will help Longstreth compare the relative benefits and costs of traditional demolition to those of deconstruction. The deconstruction process is a new method of removing buildings that uses new technology to take apart buildings in a way similar to how they were constructed. Recycle North completed its first deconstruction job in May 2001 and has taken on a total of 52 projects since then.

Longstreth said there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to show that deconstruction pays better dividends than traditional demolition, but he believes the study will back up that belief with statistics.

"We're measuring everything -- how many square feet of flooring, how much it weighs," he said. "I've been saying we can use 60-80 percent of this building. By the end we'll know precisely how much we were able to re-use."

The deconstruction process has higher labor costs than demolition, but that is balanced by the income from the sale of reusable materials and the significantly lower dumping costs. There is also the economic multiplier effect of eight people earning -- and then spending -- a living wage from a project instead of just one person.

The study is the first in the nation comparing the two methods. It is funded by a grant from the state Agency of Natural Resources. The project has also been selected to compete in a national competition among non-profits demonstrating business enterprises that create new income.

The four houses are owned by Burlington International Airport, which bought the whole street of houses in the 1990s in anticipation of expansion. Seven of the houses were sold and moved for an affordable housing project. Others had been used as training sites for the fire department, said Bob McEwing, director of planning and development at the airport. He said that when his department put the project out to bid, he had also sent a proposal to Recycle North.

"If we can save and salvage and re-use, we can all win," McEwing said. "We don't fill up landfills, and we get product that's re-useable."