MAKE MONEY BY TEARING YOUR HOUSE DOWN
Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson
lakinroe at silcom.com
Wed Dec 13 22:26:33 PST 2000
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."
© Environment News Service (ENS) 2000. All
Rights Reserved.
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