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By Root 914 0

such as doors, windows, old bathtubs, pipes, and more. This is the Stuff you get when you do a remodeling project or tear down an old house. If you have ever done either, you know that the easiest way to get rid of an unwanted wall, room, or entire building is just to demolish it. But smashed up and mixed together, you’ve got a big dusty pile of waste. Separately, what you’ve got are reusable construction materials. The Construction Materials Recycling Association estimates that more than 325 million tons of C&D waste are produced in the United States each year.55 Much of that contains good Stuff that could be recovered and reused, which would reduce not only waste but also the pressure to go cut down more trees and mine more metals.

Fortunately, increasing costs of and restrictions on landfilling this Stuff, plus a desire to avoid waste and create jobs, have encouraged dozens of new businesses devoted to recovering these valuable resources. While salvaging fireplace mantels, doors, windows, and other parts, especially woodwork and metalwork, from old buildings has been happening as long as buildings have existed, more recently, an entire green industry—called deconstruction—has blossomed. Deconstruction is like construction in reverse; it is the careful dismantling of buildings in a way that recovers the components, rather than simply trashes and clears them. From Berkeley to the Bronx, deconstruction companies are salvaging and reselling components from old buildings, keeping materials out of landfills, avoiding virgin extraction and energy-intensive production, and simultaneously creating good local jobs that can’t be outsourced.

Not far from my home in Berkeley, a pioneer in this arena since 1980, Urban Ore, has been recovering valuable materials from the waste stream and selling them for reuse. I got my bathroom sink, my office desk, a replacement panel for my garage light fixture, and the metal poles that hold up my previously collapsing backyard fence from there—all used, otherwise headed for the dump, and costing a fraction of new ones. Urban Ore favors reuse over recycling because reuse conserves not just the material in an item but also the embedded energy and craft that went into making it. And when they sell a brass faucet or an old Arts and Crafts style door for reuse, they make far more money than they would have if they sold the same piece of metal or wood for its market value for recycling. Across the top of each of sales receipt from Urban Ore is printed “Ending the Age of Waste.”

On the other side of the country, in the South Bronx, a neighborhood plagued by high unemployment, piles of waste materials all over the place, environmental degradation, and devastating rates of asthma, cancer, and other environmentally related diseases, a cooperatively run business called ReBuilders Source was launched in the spring of 2008. They are diverting much of the estimated 2,000 tons of C&D waste that arrive at waste transfer stations in the South Bronx on a daily basis and reselling it at their 18,000-square-foot retail warehouse. Their mission statement proclaims: “We work to create living wage jobs by recycling and reusing building materials. We work to create alternatives to landfills. We stand for equal opportunity, and economic and environmental justice.”56 The reason this is such a great model is that ReBuilders Source sees the connection between environmental, economic, and justice issues and is tackling them all at once.

Medical Waste

This stream gets a lot of attention, and often more than it merits: there’s actually a major gap between the real and perceived threat. People tend to freak out about waste from medical facilities, fearing it may spread AIDS or other viruses. In reality, the bulk of the waste coming out of a medical facility is the same as waste coming out of a hotel, restaurant, or office, because hospitals serve all those functions. It is not unlike other municipal waste.

A small portion of medical waste is hazardous or potentially hazardous and definitely does require special treatment;