MAKE MONEY BY TEARING YOUR HOUSE DOWN

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

                              MAKE MONEY BY TEARING YOUR HOUSE DOWN

                              GAINESVILLE, Florida, December 13, 2000 (ENS) 
- Salvaged
                              building materials can have an economical - 
and environmentally
                              friendly - alternative use as studs, trusses 
and other basic
                              construction components, a new University of 
Florida study shows.
                              Wood removed from older buildings could 
provide as much as a
                              quarter of the lumber supply for the housing 
construction industry for
                              the next 50 years, while putting a hefty dent 
in the amount of
                              demolition waste that goes into landfills 
each year, the study found.
                              "You're not filling up landfill space, you're 
not threatening the
                              groundwater, you're protecting the forests 
and making more effective
                              use of resources," said Charles Kibert, 
director of the Rinker School
                              of Building Construction. Lucy Acquaye, a 
graduate student in
                              building construction who did the research 
for her master's thesis,
                              said that in Florida, the construction 
industry constitutes 23 percent
                              of all municipal solid waste, and of that, 92 
percent comes from the
                              renovation and demolition of old structures. 
Meanwhile, landfill space
                              is being lost to new development.

                              Acquaye studied wood from three houses in 
Gainesville. Built between
                              1900 and 1950 of Southern pine, the houses 
were taken apart using
                              different techniques, from total demolition 
to careful deconstruction,
                              where the focus was on salvaging as much 
usable material as
                              possible. She said the contractor made a 
profit on the deconstructed
                              house because he was able to sell much of the 
building's materials.
                              "Instead of demolishing houses, there is the 
potential for creating
                              many new businesses. You have to take the 
building apart, extract
                              the materials, resell them, move them from 
point A to point B and
                              maybe even do some remanufacturing and clean 
up," Kibert said. "We
                              think it could generate a lot of new economic 
activity, and you'd
                              have 10 times as many jobs compared to simply 
landfilling
                              construction waste."






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