Pollution Begins At Home
Feb 23rd, 2007 at 2:48 pm by Maya
Ecohuman gives us a lesson on building waste:
The biggest polluter and energy user on the planet? Not cars. Not planes. Not refineries.
It’s buildings. Even “green” buildings. Houses, factories, monstrous skyscrapers, commercial buildings, those nifty concrete and glass condos on the corner.
I’m not sure what to do about it, though. Is all that waste something that could be salvageable or recycleable with more careful demolition procedures? Is there any kind of middle road between abandoning civilization and reckless development? I know one thing: the more I learn about the road we’re going down, the more unsustainable it looks.
When we finally can figure out how to build robots that can analyze and sort our garabage, I think lots of this will be mute - in fact I bet someday our current dumps will be “gold mines” when it becomes cheap enough to extract all the “cool stuff” we are throwing away now as garbage because it just isn’t cost effective to process it now.
Oddly enough demolition is part of what I do for a living and you’d be surprised at how far we’ve come in the last ten years. Most of the sheet rock, wood, glass, concrete and metal actually is recycled. Although not all of it.
Maya, thanks for visiting and reading!
here in Portland, Oregon most C&D waste is not recycled, despite our reputation as a “green” city.
we’ve got several organizations encouraging recycling & reuse (rebuildingcenter.org for example) and LEED encourages it.
but–it’s still fractional and doesn’t address the main problem: simply building too much and with ecologically poor materials.
Maya, thanks for visiting and reading!
here in Portland, Oregon most C&D waste is not recycled, despite our reputation as a “green” city.
you might enjoy Wendell Berry’s book _Life is a Mircale_.
My dad, an estimator, just got LEED certified. I haven’t seen him so excited about anything in ages!