Everyone knows to reduce, reuse, and recycle common household items, but what do you do with building materials such as a cabinet set, door, or dining room flooring. With a little strategy and care, those items can also be reused and recycled. Here at The RE Store, our licensed and insured salvage crew is able to save up to 90% of a structures desirable materials for reuse. Available for sale to our customers at The RE Store, salvaged materials then live on in the homes and buildings of our community.
The basics of building salvage
Building deconstruction refers to the process of taking apart a structure piece-by-piece for the purpose of reuse and recycling. Deconstruction is also referred to as green demolition, salvage, or architectural salvage. Deconstruction has been around since humans first began to build structures. Why harvest new materials when you can reuse old materials? But around the time of the Great Depression, governments and manufacturers began to utilize the idea of planned obsolescence to lift economies out of depression. This meant that buildings were demolished en-masse in order to make way for new construction projects.
In the early 1990’s, with the rise of sustainable practices, building deconstruction began gaining popularity as a responsible alternative to traditional demolition. Where traditional demolition uses heavy machinery to smash and wreck, modern deconstruction uses a skilled crew to save, reuse, and recycle as much material as possible.
The environmental benefits of salvage
In Whatcom County, the materials that we throw away end up in landfills along the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon. Out of site, out of mind, right? Not quite. Each year, landfills are the third largest source of methane production around the world, accounting for 11% of all methane worldwide. Unfortunately, many of our landfills are made up of as much as 60% construction and waste debris – often from demolition and home renovation projects.
Perfectly good flooring, cabinets, trim, doors and windows have no place in our landfills. Deconstruction can save these materials for reuse, and everything else that can’t be saved can often be recycled. Older homes and buildings are made of lumber that is literally irreplaceable, milled decades ago from old growth forests that grew untouched for hundreds of years. Old growth lumber is invaluable, as it is nearly impossible to find today, and makes for an unbeatable building material: it is beautiful enough for fine woodworking, but it’s also stronger and more resistant to fire, bug damage, rot, and fungus than most lumber used in construction today.
Enlist our salvage crew to remove your structure
If you’re planning to remodel, remove, or renovate consider enlisting the help of our salvage crew. As a licensed and bonded demolition contractor, our salvage crew has decades of combined experience coming up with and executing these plans for all kinds of deconstruction projects, big and small. That means from the roof to the foundation, we can help maximize reusable and recyclable materials yields and divert all kinds of building materials out of the waste stream.
We specialize in the removal of:
- Kitchen furnishings,
- Bathroom fixtures,
- Wood Flooring,
- Sheds, garages, and outbuildings,
- Doors and trim,
- Fencing and decking.
