Last April, Sarah Proctor and her husband Dick decided to tear down the home they shared in Raleigh, N.C. for more than 25 years. While the couple loved the neighborhood, their 1928 home was falling into disrepair and becoming increasingly difficult to live in as their needs changed with age.
“We’re at the age and stage where we wanted a first-floor bedroom,” Sarah Proctor remembered. “Everything in [the old home] was upstairs. No insulation, no central air…Architecturally, we wanted a better living house for us.”
After resolving to tear down the old house and start from scratch, the Proctors were faced with a dilemma: How to demolish the home that meant so much to them and what to do with the remaining materials.
The couple started where most of us would; they called a local contractor to come by with a bulldozer and give them an estimate. But the young Proctor generation had different ideas.
“To be honest our children are greener than we are, and they’re always urging us to do greener things,” Proctor said with a laugh and a quintessential Southern twang.
With encouragement from their 20-something children, the Proctors contacted a friend on the board of Habitat for Humanity of Wake County – the local affiliate serving Raleigh and surrounding neighborhoods – and asked about its deconstruction program. Within weeks, Habitat volunteers were hard at work in the family’s home – painstakingly disassembling components and salvaging materials for reuse in the community.
“We looked at it from all kinds of angles, financial angles as well, and hands-down deconstruction won in every category,” she said. “It worked in the building schedule, and there was a financial tax break about it. It was a win-win all the way around.”
As work on the Proctors’ new house began, the couple found comfort in the fact that pieces of the home in which they raised their children would find a second life in another family’s dwelling – providing a setting for a whole new wave of cherished memories.
Why choose deconstruction?
Building-related projects in the U.S. generate an estimated 164 million tons of construction and demolition (C&D) material every year, according to the EPA. At a typical demolition site, emphasis is placed on removing the structure as quickly and cheaply as possible. As a result, a mere 40 percent of C&D material is reused, recycled or sent to waste-to-energy facilities, while 60 percent is sent to C&D landfills, the agency said.
But by choosing deconstruction as an alternative means to manage tossed building materials, families like the Proctors are beginning to change all that. So, what exactly is deconstruction, and how can it benefit the environment and local communities?
“Deconstruction is the dismantling of buildings to maximize the reuse and recycling of building materials in a cost-effective manner, turning much of what is traditionally considered demolition waste into a valuable resource,” the EPA said.
Preventing useful materials from heading to the landfill carries obvious environmental benefits, such as shrinking the C&D waste stream and reducing the need for virgin materials in new construction. But deconstructing homes in partnership with charitable organizations like Habitat for Humanity can also make a world of difference for local families in need, as reclaimed materials find their way into neighbors’ homes while funding other community projects.
“People want to feel good about what they’re doing,” said Joel Lubell, who has been the deconstruction manager at Habitat for Humanity of Wake County for more than eight years. “So we come in, we can give them a fair quote, they get to work with Habitat and they get a tax deduction.”
“All that said, it kind of becomes a win-win-win situation: The homeowner wins, Habitat wins and the community at-large wins for having that stuff not piled into the landfill and also having it available for sale at our ReStore.”
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