This week I would like to continue down the city's path and focus on the buildings themselves a little more carefully. I realize that not everything we build is meant to last centuries, so what about those buildings? What do we do with them? Well, currently, unless they are steel framed, they go straight to the landfill. No recycling, whatsoever. We recycle our plastic, why not recycle our buildings too!
The first part of this deals with last week's reading for item number one on the list: use waste as a resource. When we tear down a building and put it into a landfill, we are wasting precious resources. Yes, some homes may have somethings taken out, like light fixtures,bricks and door knobs, but what about the studs, the shingles, and the drywall? Heck, what about the thousands of nails, screws, and other metal fasteners? My idea is to set up a recycling service for buildings. When you tear down a house, a team of people come and tear it down bit by bit for its valuable resources. These resources would then be reused, melted down, or chopped up to make new resources. This would also save on fuel costs, to the environment and the consumer, from not having to ship in new material from elsewhere around the globe. A study done on tshirts could be applied to this as well, "it concluded that the environmental cost of transportation was significant and amount to about half the cost..."
The second part to this plan is that most likely this type of recycling program would be carried out at a local or at least regional level. This service would provide a community with needed jobs and also provide new materials for new local factories. Those pieces from the house need to be made into something else somewhere. Why not have the local wood factory shred the old studs and make them into plywood, or the nail factory take old nails and make them into new nails. Again, we do this with plastic bottles, why not with building materials. This would be considered a "holistic, cradle-to-grave approach..." in which we think not only about the first use, but the second, the third, and so on (Quinn).
So in conclusion, recycling can apply to everything we use, bot just fabrics and plastic bottles. We need to think smarter, not harder in how we go about this, and we will ultimately live better lives because of it.
I like your ideas this week, Josh! You make an interesting point that we just need to be thinking smarter instead of harder. It seems so simple when you say it that way and we shouldn't be making this concept of going green harder than it should be!
ReplyDeleteThanks! Glad you liked the idea!
DeleteHey Josh, good idea. In my architecture and entrepreneurship class we actually thought about this idea as well, but it was more along the lines of streamlining parts so that future buildings all use the same bolts, the same frames, etc. so that parts can be reused and minimized. I think a lot of the difficulty lies in the construction and destruction process, getting them to change the ways theyve always done it. Perhaps this could be incorporated into LEED principles?
ReplyDeleteLEED could be a way to do this, yes, but I am not sold on LEED yet. It has a lot of its own problems, which I won't get into. The thing about streamlining parts and things is that that limits choice and creativity in a big way, although, I guess a lot of the builders grade houses are similar. Back in the 50's, Sears actually had a house kit you could buy, and there are several of these that were built in Tulsa. Most of what has been done today is pipe dreams. Mostly one off's, and I am not sure without a revolution of the industry that we would get anything different.
DeleteHi Josh, I really like your idea of recycling buildings, but wonder about the resources being used to breakdown those recycled materials to make them new again in the first place? I like the idea of breaking down old wood to be used in plywood. In one of the readings either this week or last week, I saw someone bring up the idea of using old abandoned buildings as greenhouses. So inside the "concrete jungle" there would be something living and usable. For instance, for people who live in New York City, really the only outdoorsy type place they can go to is Central Park, but why not change that and use old buildings to house greenhouses or possibly some sort of controlled farming situation, so that it would not have to be a concrete jungle anymore? Let me know what you think!
ReplyDeleteMuch of the recycling that I described would be using just physical labor. Sorting, prying, cutting, etc. Some of it would be energy intensive, but is that less energy than using virgin material? Probably not, by a long shot. There are actually a few examples of this either being rehabbed, or being built new construction of the concept you described. The thing about the urban greenhouses are that they are very energy intensive, so not very sustainable, but LED lighting is changing that. So maybe in the distant future this will be more possible. I think a big problem with a lot of those buildings is access to daylight in the first place. This will come with better design of buildings in the future.
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