I’m sure our building crew roll their eyes when they see us drive up to the lot with yet another load of recycled building materials. Today, we picked up an exterior French door and 9 more bundles of shingles, and plan to load the $140 garage door onto the new/old roof rack for the trip to the building site this week .
On the job site itself, we have been tackling the clean-up this week. It’s never done, like housework. (“Doing housework is like stringing beads on a string without a knot on the end.”) One of our original guidelines for construction was to keep the waste to an absolute minimum. Ron has been parsimonious with plywood and dimensional lumber especially. I think he takes pride in using materials efficiently. But, I expect there’s a fair bit of eye-rolling over my recycling obsession.
There is still a huge pile of debris to deal with. There are various useful boards with nails in them, to be de-nailed. There are thousands of pieces too small even for Ron’s parsimony. Normally, this would all be burnt on site when fire restrictions allow. But, faithful readers will recall that D’s pet project is his highly efficient wood-burning thermal mass fireplace (with pizza oven on top). We can burn all this kiln-dried wood as fuel, but it has to be moved somewhere out of the way in the meantime.
There are bunches of cardboard from wrapping and containers.
There are the metal straps from pallets of materials. Tin rolls from electrical wires. Scraps from the metal roof cuts.
Plastic rails from the bottom of the windows (can go back to the manufacturer for re-use.)
Heavy-duty webbed plastic from lumber pallets (we can use these underneath pathways to keep them free of weeds.)
There are maybe 20 kilograms of bent and rusty nails, or wet or dropped nails from nail guns. Our roofer brought a metal broom to the site (magnet-on-a-stick), and it was fun to pick up the nails inside and out.
We can recycle most things at the local depot. We have been managing to get one bag of true garbage out to the curb on garbage day, so if that’s the worst of it, I feel proud. I know that landfills contain anywhere from 25 – 50% construction waste. Let very little of that waste be ours.
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