Why taking apart buildings piece by piece is a climate solution
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As NPR’s Climate Solutions Week continues, there’s a growing movement to approach old buildings not as teardowns, but as resources to mine for reusable materials. KUNC’s Rae Solomon reports.
RAE SOLOMON, BYLINE: The year was 1954. Construction crews were busy developing Boulder, Colorado, as a working-class community. They built small, single-family homes like this one — a snug three-bed, two-bath with metal siding near the top of a green, hilly street.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAMMER BANGING)
SOLOMON: But some 70 years later, that modest home no longer fits the bill for today’s Boulderites, who want more spacious, modern dwellings. It needs to go. So now a very different type of crew is busy in the neighborhood.
ANNA PERKS: Our team is systematically unbuilding the structure.
SOLOMON: That’s contractor Anna Perks.
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SOLOMON: The roof of this house is already long gone. Siding, too. Workers now wield hammers and crowbars, prying pieces of wood sheathing off the studs and carefully sorting materials. Others claw nails out of two-by-sixes in the backyard.
PERKS: We’ve got a pretty good pile of lumber that’s all ceiling joists and floor joists, and there’s a lot of good, reusable lumber in there.
SOLOMON: Perks’ job here illustrates a big shift in how we think about clearing away old buildings to make way for the new. Not demolition, but the meticulous, deliberate process of deconstruction.
PERKS: Typically, what happens is a bulldozer will come in, just smash it all. It’ll all get trashed. But deconstruction, we try to salvage and recycle as much as possible.
SOLOMON: The idea is to limit the climate impact of our built environment, which accounts for nearly 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Michelle Lambert, with the nonprofit Carbon Leadership Forum, says about half of that comes from the embodied carbon of construction materials.
MICHELLE LAMBERT: So it’s all of the greenhouse gas emissions in the process of creating, installing, using and disposing of building materials.
SOLOMON: The big promise of deconstruction, she says, is in creating a circular economy for building materials — harvesting lumber, say, from an old house, rather than a forest.
LAMBERT: Making use of the materials that we have already manufactured is one of the most impactful ways that we can reduce embodied carbon, eliminating all of those emissions that would have been required to create new materials.
SOLOMON: A handful of local governments, from California to Florida and counting, now require that some amount of demolition waste be salvaged for reuse or recycling. Here in Boulder, more than 140 million pounds of materials have been kept out of landfills since such an ordinance was adopted in 2020. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. You need infrastructure for processing and distributing all those salvaged materials, not to mention people who want to buy them. A lot of places don’t have those markets. And according to developer Chris Fellows, deconstruction can be much pricier than traditional demolition.
CHRIS FELLOWS: Oh, I think percentage wise, probably 35- to 40% more expensive.
SOLOMON: That’s because of the time and labor involved. Fellows hired Perks to deconstruct a few crumbling farm buildings at a site he’s now developing as a mixed-use residential neighborhood in Aurora. He says the process added at least a year to his project schedule. Even so, he’s glad they went for it.
FELLOWS: We wanted to be good stewards of the land in terms of the climate and the environment, so to the extent that we could reuse and recycle any materials, we wanted to do that.
SOLOMON: He expects an eventual return on the investment when eco-conscious homebuyers learn about his process.
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SOLOMON: And as the deconstruction movement matures, Perks says builders can start planning for disassembly on the front end.
PERKS: When you’re designing, can you think about what’s this going to be like to take it down, and when it gets taken down, can it be reused?
SOLOMON: So the future of climate-conscious construction could be knowing exactly how you’d take a building apart before you even put it together.
For NPR News, I’m Rae Solomon in Boulder, Colorado.
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