Pittsburgh has long been a national leader in the green building movement. Now a new effort headed up by
Construction Junction (CJ)—Pennsylvania's largest nonprofit building material reuse retailer—is bringing green demolition to the city.
Dubbed “unbuilding green,” the project involves deconstructing a 2000-square-foot condemned property located at 6121 East Liberty Blvd. A coalition of nonprofits, business and elected officials—including
East Liberty Development, Inc.,
Sen. Ferlo,
Mayor Ravenstahl, and the
URA—have teamed up to host Pittsburgh’s first hybrid deconstruction project which started Sept. 22 in East Liberty.
“This is a training project, a practice building. It’s fairly complicated—we’ve got our toe in the water,” says Mike Gable, with CJ. “We want to undertake projects that get a certain percentage of material for the effort and time put in.” To harvest and process materials for reuse and recycling, CJ will systematically disassemble the building via a hybrid model that combines human and machine labor. Gable’s team will record project costs, develop green demolition practices and estimate the dollar value of harvested materials.
RE-USE Consulting’s Dave Bennink—who is based in Bellingham, Washington and has deconstructed 500 structures across the U.S.—is training CJ’s salvage crew. The project— CJ’s first full building deconstruction—will significantly increase the amount of building materials the nonprofit resells and diverts from landfills.
“The city wants us to get into a greener form of demolition,” adds Gable, who says that a 2,000-square-foot house can potentially yield up to 6,000 board feet of reusable lumber. “We’d like to take an inventory of condemned buildings to see what’s worth deconstructing.” Residential deconstruction typically costs more than conventional demolition, but can divert up to 80% of house debris from landfills.
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Jennifer BaronSource: Mike Gable, executive director, Construction Junction
Image courtesy Construction Junction