Winter was over at Breckenridge Ski Resort, but the season was just starting for Kat Slaughter, owner of Vert Sites, a local sustainable construction materials management company.
Slaughter walked through the empty aisles of the ski school locker room taking inventory. Clutching a binder and snapping photos, she opened and closed the locker doors. They were in good working order, which meant they’d be salvageable when the building gets torn down this summer to make way for luxury housing. The lockers, Slaughter mused, might even be in high demand on the resell market among people with fond memories of the ski school.
“There’s over 200 ski lockers here,” Slaughter said, jotting down some notes. “The opportunity is how can we get local community members stoked about the ski lockers before we scrap metal recycle them.”
As old homes and buildings come down to make way for the new, specialty contractors and consultants like Slaughter are moving in to handle the materials left behind. They’re part of the growing deconstruction movement. Proponents are creating a circular economy of reuse for building materials. It keeps waste out of landfills and shrinks the carbon footprint of buildings and infrastructure.
Meticulously documenting the building, Slaughter, who was hired by site developer Breckenridge Grand Vacations, matched various materials and building components with their most promising prospects for a useful afterlife. Bathroom sinks, for instance, had high potential for reuse. The toilets, on the other hand, were destined to be crushed into road fill.
“With deconstruction, you are essentially trying to salvage as many materials as possible and either send them to a warehouse or find other contractors or projects interested in using these materials,” Slaughter said. “You're unbuilding a building. You are taking a surgical approach,”
The carbon emissions embodied in buildings
The idea behind deconstruction is to limit the climate impact of our built environment, which accounts for nearly 40 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Michelle Lambert, the policy and engagement manager at the nonprofit Carbon Leadership Forum, about half of that comes from the embodied carbon of construction materials.
“Embodied carbon is the greenhouse gas emissions that are generated by the manufacturing, the transportation, the installation, all the way through to the disposal of construction materials that are used in buildings or in roads and other infrastructure projects,” Lambert said.
For a long time, experts have focused on the climate impact of building operations – the energy used to heat, cool and electrify spaces. But over the past decade, it’s become clear that construction materials – and the processes that create them – represent a significant part of a building’s carbon footprint.
The big promise of deconstruction is in creating a circular economy for building materials – the opportunity to harvest lumber from an old house, rather than a forest.
“Making use of the materials that we have already manufactured is one of the most impactful ways that we can reduce embodied carbon,” Lambert said. “Eliminating all of those emissions that would've been required to create new materials.”
On the books
Over the past decade, a handful of local governments, from Palo Alto, Calif. to Fort Meyers, Fla., now either require some percentage of demolition waste be salvaged, reused and recycled or incentivize the practice.
In Boulder, more than 140 million pounds of materials have been kept out of landfills since adeconstruction ordinance was adopted in 2020, according to Circular Economy Policy Advisor Emily Freeman. Since it went into effect, more than 83% of the construction waste generated in the city has been kept out of landfills.
As the deconstruction movement continues to mature, Perks said the next frontier would be for builders to start planning for disassembly on the front end.
“Can you either incorporate reclaimed materials into the new design, or when you're designing, can you think about what's this going be like to take it down,” she said. “And when it gets taken down, can it be reused?”
The challenges of deconstruction
When Chris Fellows, president of Colorado-based development company Resolute Strategies, decided to turn a former homestead in Aurora into a mixed-use residential neighborhood, he hired Perks Deconstruction to disassemble a few old crumbling farm buildings on the property. The deconstruction team salvaged bricks and wood from the old farmhouse and barn that will be repurposed in new buildings on the site.
“This was a place where there's cool history in the pioneers that did dryland farming,” Fellows said. “We're trying to honor that part of that culture of Colorado.”
Fellows said he and his partners were motivated to cut the carbon footprint of the project and reuse as many of the original materials as possible.
“We wanted to be good stewards of the land in terms of the climate and the environment,” he said. “To the extent that we could reuse and recycle any materials we wanted to do that.”
But deconstruction can be a challenge. A successful program requires local infrastructure for processing and distributing salvaged materials, not to mention local end markets – people who want to buy and use those materials.
The Front Range has a robust deconstruction ecosystem that includes expert contractors and recycling facilities for concrete, masonry and lumber, not to mention several building materials reuse stores and donation centers.
“We have to have a place to take all this material,” said Anna Perks, who co-owns Perks Deconstruction. “It gets really hard for contractors when there's nowhere to take the material.”
The extra cost of deconstruction can also make it a hard sell. Homeowners and developers may be motivated by environmental reasons, because the economic incentives aren't necessarily there.
Fellows estimates deconstruction increased his project costs 35-40% and added at least a year to the schedule.
“Because we had to stage things carefully, and do them in a certain sequence,” he said. “And we had to find the right people.”
Summit County doesn’t yet have a deconstruction policy, but officials are considering the idea. However, in Breckenridge, Slaughter says the industry isn’t as mature as it is on the Front Range because resources are scarce in the high country.
“In order to have a successful deconstruction program, it's nice to have reuse stores and currently Summit County doesn’t have that. There's a challenge of do we take materials down to the Front Range? Do these places even want these materials?” she said. “You have to take into consideration the greenhouse gas and transportation impact.”
It’s not yet clear how much more deconstructing the ski school will cost Breckenridge Grand Vacations, according to sustainability manager Emily Kimmel. But she said they are prepared to pay for it.
“We know it’s the right thing to do and it’s something that we care about,” Kimmel said. “We want to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions from company operations by 50% by 2030.”
Both Kimmel and Fellows said they expect eventual returns on their investments in the circular building economy as potential homebuyers learn about the process and buy in.
“People are looking for a more responsible or sustainable place - a place with sustainable initiatives,” Kimmel said. “We want to make sure we can capture those people. They’re really interested in it.”
