Palm | Kelapa Sawit

There is a fairly new capstone here at PSU called “Deconstruction” and its time is overdue because I have personally seen a house destroyed with two dump trucks and an excavator; saving nothing. In other words all wiring, plumbing, large timbers, reusable masonry was all gone to a landfill—not to mention the mercury and other hazardous wastes. There is now a new economic niche for this kind of thing like the “Deconstruction Institute”; that’s does a fine job at consulting some of this new technology. However, this is not entirely new as even here in Portland the “City Repair” has the “Village Convergence Alliance” (I think I remember the term), which was into the same thing. Have you heard of “Urbanite”? All it consists of is broken up concrete, but I was in a project that made a beautiful building of it (although small). I have a steep driveway and would love for a few truckloads to just dump it off there.

Deconstruction isn’t all that limited anymore as you can see from this photo from the Deconstruction institute witnessing “R. Baker & Son All Industrial Services, Inc.” doing a large commercial building. I have seen the basement of a 15 story building in San Francisco that had many and huge wooden timbers (and yes, they held up the building) and it would be a crime to waste them.

I think part of the problem is tradition (“just get it out of here!) and ignorance.There is money to be saved in these other recycled materials just like there has always been with copper wire. Some websites are designed to help streamline and make efficient time and labor costs like metrokc.gov. We need to let people know by word of mouth, green building construction, and maybe with the high cost of trucking now builders will look more for deconstruction firms.

David Best, PSU student