Saved from landfill, old treasures get new life
John SMITH watches his gardener dig irrigation pipe trenches around the triple king palms he has just craned into his front garden. The palms shoot 30 feet in the air. Much to the neighbors’ shock, Smith has bulldozed the corner lot’s lawn, brought in granite boulders and planted every sort of exotic plant you can imagine.
And he didn’t have to pay for a single one. They all came from the gardens of houses he demolished. Not only that, but doors, pergolas and brickwork he has used to renovate this San Diego house also came from houses he tore down.
Smith is a new generation of house demolisher. You can forget the wrecking ball. By the time he gets to tear down a house, there’s often not much left. He’s been too busy recycling. “We have salvagers come in. They start at the roof, take the tiles, the windows, the doors, the fixtures, the lumber -- that goes to Mexico. We pretty much dismantle by hand.” Even the concrete slabs and pools are smashed for road base.
Of course, it’s not all from the goodness of his heart. Economics drives the trend. Read: landfill fees.
“Twenty-five years ago when I started, people would just crush [the house], scoop up the concrete, trash, everything, throw it in a truck and go to the landfill. It cost $5 a load. Now, for that same load, I would pay between $400 to $800.”
That’s a big incentive to avoid the landfill. Recycling, in other words, is at last starting to pay off.
But as Smith acknowledges, the uncrowned king of house recycling is Ted Reiff, known to some as “the man with the velvet crowbar.” From San Francisco to L.A. to San Diego, the organization Reiff helped create is turning homeowners’ ideas of demolition into a very different thought: deconstruction.
Reiff got the idea during the disastrous floods that hit Tijuana in 1993. An investment banker at the time, Reiff helped launch a campaign to collect used building materials for the displaced flood victims. “Four hundred tons of building materials were donated,” he says. “It took 27 tractor-trailers to transport it all to Mexico.”
What astonished him -- apart from the outpouring of generosity -- was how much good used stuff there was out there and how much of it normally went to landfills. The insight caused him to change careers and create the ReUse People, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to “keeping usable building materials out of our landfills and providing them for reuse.”
The organization grew quickly. Using contractors, it carefully deconstructs 50 to 60 houses, offices, even movie sets annually, throughout California.
“From those deconstructions we get lumber, doors, windows, door and window hardware, floor heaters, stoves, refrigerators, old-style fences,” says Reiff. And period treasures. “We got 45 leaded glass windows from a house recently. They should be tossed into landfill? I don’t think so.”
Reiff says that in its nine years, his company has salvaged more than 200,000 tons of usable building materials.
Salvaged lumber is the biggest seller. Redwood timber walls, oak floors, cedar decks. Then doors, windows and kitchen cabinets, which “people transfer right into their own kitchens for way below what it would cost to install new ones.”
Most homeowners hear about the ReUse People through the general contractor they hire for their new house, Reiff explains. He says interested parties should contact local planning departments for details. The group has toll-free number, (888) 588-9490, and a website, www.TheReusePeople.org.
