Zero Waste - Construction and Deconstruction

Construction and Deconstruction

Zero Waste is a goal, a process, a way of thinking that profoundly changes our approach to resources and production. Zero Waste is not about recycling and diversion from landfills but about restructuring production and distribution systems to prevent waste from being manufactured in the first place. The materials that are still required in these re-designed, resource-efficient systems will be reused many times as the products that incorporate them are reused. Deconstruction can be described as construction in reverse. It involves carefully taking apart a building to maximize the reuse of materials, thereby reducing waste and conserving resources. Deconstruction can capture materials and some components from the millions of buildings that are existing and that were poorly designed for high level reuse but it is not a favored approach from a Zero Waste point of view. Zero Waste favors the design of buildings as assemblages of high level components, not their creation from rough materials such as lumber, cement or plaster. The details are not worked out yet but to the extent that entire rooms, entire walls, roofs or floors or entire utility systems can be pre-built and installed as completed components, that will be the goal of Zero Waste design. Until buildings are built as components capable of later dismantling, deconstruction is a stop-gap process that the United States can use to minimize the waste of building materials. For now, the largest parts that we are able to save tend to be architectural elements, windows, doors, and metals, many of which are being saved and resold by reuse yards such as Urban Ore in Berkeley California. The main parts that still need to be crushed are wood flooring, brick walls, and structural timbers. The demolition of traditional buildings has been long done by wrecking ball or bulldozer. Social and political artifacts, such as demolition contractor licenses and required permits that can only be satisfied by destruction and discard (with partial recycling of rubble and steel), render the destruction and disposal costs cheaper than deconstruction. Approximately seventy pounds of the waste is generated for about every square foot of the residential building demolition. It is arguable that this is artificial economics, based on the cultural preference for wastefulness and that Zero Waste designs of dismantlable components will ultimately be the cheapest as well as the most conservative way to reuse buildings. Further discussions of this topic may be found on the ZWI website.