When Meredith Moore moved from Toronto to New York, she was astonished by the amount of home renovation happening in the city – and by the full construction waste bins. "I would see these dumpsters just filled with wood and trim and doors and all these things that I knew were not waste," said Moore, who has always looked for ways things could be reused in her previous work as an interior designer. So when her family bought their own Toronto fixer-upper four years ago, she told their contractors that they wanted to save as much material as possible.
"And we were just met with 'No's,'" she recalled."'That's not how it works. All that material is junk.
No one is ever going to use it.'" But Moore didn't want to take no for an answer. Instead, she founded Ouroboros Deconstruction, putting together a crew tasked not with demolition, but "deconstruction," so that the materials could be reused and recycled.
Deconstruction may seem slow, inefficient and potentially costly compared to just knocking something down. But there's growing interest from building owners and the construction industry alike in taking a more careful approach — which cuts waste and emissions by giving new life to old materials. Crew member Rocky uses hand tools such as crowbars to take apart the roof truss of the house.
(Emily Chung/CBC) If you want to renovate or replace an existing building, standard practice has been demolition — breaking it apart with tools and machines, and putting the resulting rubble.
