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At a casual glance from the sidewalk, it might look like these old houses are being demolished. But that’s not the case, they’re being deconstructed so materials and fixtures can be reused or recycled.

“Reuse means I’m going to take this product from this house and without much modification at all, I’m going to incorporate it into another project,” said Michael Gainer of ReUse Action, Inc. in Buffalo, N.Y.

As opposed to recycling. Recycling is, let’s say I have a bunch of busted broken two by fours that I can’t reuse. That I can put by a dumpster and they can take to a facility and they grind that up and turn that into mulch. This project is dubbed a hybrid deconstruction and begins with what’s called a soft skim.

On our first wave we send people in and we pull out all the windows, all the doors, all the cabinets, all the fixtures, everything we believe is valuable enough.

“Then you dissemble the building into panels and when you get those panels down you then figure out strategically what valuable material you have in those panels and which of those materials it makes sense to try to go and harvest out of those panels,” Paul Crovella said, SUNY ESF Sustainable Construction Management. “Pick up that panel, lower it to the ground and rip it apart and get all the two by eights and tens and twelves out of there and the flooring if we can.”

So what’s the market for reusing this lumber?

Crovella said, “Right now most of this lumber is used for aesthetics and finishes. Exterior siding, interior flooring, clapboard all that kind of stuff and there’s a strong market for that because the supply is so low.”

In this construction project, ESF has contracted for some of the salvaged material to be used in the new building going up on this site.

Gainer said, “And when I talk about life-cycle analysis and closing the loop, that is really it. If we can figure out ways to quickly connect buildings that are coming apart to potential uses in new construction we’ve really taken a big step to making this not something that’s on the edge or out of the ordinary but it’s something that’s very sensible and very mainstream.”