Recycling Construction Waste

After a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of being able to see the floor in the garage for the first time in a decade, my wife Maggie agreed to the idea of building a shed to house our bikes and gardening tools. After consulting the feng shui garden designer, we established a site and the shed began.

This is was not to be an ordinary shed. It was to be created almost entirely of garbage.

It all started when three of my neighbors decided that it was time to add-on to their houses. In the space of three weeks, three dumpsters were parked in three driveways, and deconstruction began.

Dumpsters were an anathema to my father. He could not, for the life of him, understand why people were throwing away perfectly good itemsitems he gladly scrounged and brought home with all the excitement of a boy rescuing a puppy from the pound. Look at this, he'd say, a knowing smile on his face. It was always something in relatively good shape, sometimes needing a coat of paint or a few extra screws, but never anything that we really needed. At least, not at that exact moment. Or ever, as my mother would quickly and repeatedly point out. There were, at any given time, things as varied as a 15' catamaran sailing boat (my Dad did not sail), a double pedestal oak desk (we already had two), perfectly good lumber (for what?), various lamps (just needs a new plug and a shade), and pieces of plate glass (I don't know, maybe coasters?).

It's easy to establish the origins of my father's pack-rat nature: he lived on a farm in Saskatchewan during the Dirty Thirties. In those days, things were not thrown out. They were simply set aside until another use for them could be found. People had so few things, and the sense of community was so strong, that things were re-purposed, repaired, or shared, rather than dumped.

So, I guess it's not surprising that the shed sprang up the way it did.

Across the street, the sounds of crowbars and chainsaws began, and so did I. With the approval of my neighbor, her builder, and the demolition crew, I began to scrounge. The roof came off to expose 16 thirteen-foot 2x6s. They became studs for the walls. The 2x10 fascia boards were discarded and became the floor joists. Triangle-shaped plywood cutoffs from the new roof were born again in a crazy geometry lesson of a floor. A leftover four-foot-long section of clear 4x4 yellow cedar was cut and hand split to become a design detail under the gable.

As my two sons and a conscripted neighbor boy worked away, I would enumerate the savings. Look at this! This piece of 2x6 would cost $8 in the store, I'd say, grinning away, and the 14-year-olds would roll their eyes as loudly as they could.

The two best scrounges of the project came at the end of the construction. I had sided the front of the shed with some reclaimed cedar siding from a fence I had torn down, and I was short on cedar for the long side. Resigned to having to go to the cedar mills on River Road, I loaded up the trailer with the few non-usable odds and ends from the job, and headed for the dump, intending to pick up the cedar in the same load.

Imagine my surprise, as I was dumping my odds and ends into the bin at the dump, when a fellow pulls up with his trailer and dumps out perfect 1x10 pieces of cedar siding from a garage he was tearing down. After some intricate negotiations with the crew at the dump, I filled up my trailer from his, and headed home, loaded down with more cedar than I needed for the job, saving about $200 and part of a tree, and diverting a little waste from the landfill.

A small bit of waste to be sure. Each year the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) accepts 1.2 million tons of garbage, but 64% of it is construction waste. An additional 400,000 tons of demolition and construction waste is sent to private landfills. The only bright light in this dark picture is the 70% that is actually recycled. In fact, the GVRD is one of the leaders in construction waste recycling, with streams for concrete, asphalt, wood, and green waste. Good for us, bad for the rest of North America.

The finishing touch for the job was the shelving for the inside, and for those I turned to Delta Freecycle. I posted a request for storage units and within a day, two offers for shelving appeared in my mailbox. Freecycling is a movement that began in May 2003 to promote waste reduction in Tucson's downtown and help save desert landscape from being taken over by landfills. In two short years, the concept has blossomed, with 3,203 groups around the world and 1,793,318 members. In Delta the Freecycle community started in June 2004, and now has over 750 members. To find cool stuff, and to get rid of your usable but not required items, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Delta_Freecycle/. Another excellent resource is http://www.vancouver.reuses.com/.

The end of this story? My four-year-old and I were biking this week along Central Avenue, where they are tearing down a couple of old houses to make way for four new ones. As we sat and watched the demolition machines obliterate the old houses, we could catch glimpses of perfectly salvageable lumber before it splintered in the maw of the machine. My son thought for a minute, and then said, You know Dad, there are some good 2x4s there. The torch has been passed.