Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Yes, there can be additional labor involved. On the other hand, the labor and real (IOW environmental as well as economic) expense of milling or mining new materials and shipping them to your site can often equal or surpass the costs of recycling locally. And you have the added benefit of NOT milling or mining new materials.
Now, imagine the real cost of just letting those homes, and all that useful material, just rot away, forcing you to rebuild from new materials... you've just doubled (at least) the cost of building a home, because you did not recycle the old material, essentially throwing it away.
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If you research the actual costs, I suspect you'll find it's faster, simpler, and cheaper to just demolish the existing property and build new housing on the land. If what you suggest were as attractive as you believe, it would be done now, and for the most part, it isn't.
Lots of the stuff you advocate recycling are either renewable resources (lumber), or sufficiently plentiful that the concern in recycling isn't scarcity of the material, it's reducing the amount that becomes refuse that must be stored somewhere (glass).
I assure you, the homes won't be allowed to just rot away. The underlying land is likely to be too valuable to be left to lie fallow that long.
You can look at recycling the material you've demolished, but reusing it to build new housing is unlikely. The process of dismantling the existing dwelling will render much of it unusable directly, unless you exercise enough care in dismantling to significantly increase the time required and the costs of doing it.
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Dennis