The Carbon Efficient City: Building Blocks to Cool Our Planet

5. Built to Last

64 I n the world of consumer products, “reduce, reuse, recycle” is the catchphrase for strategies that reduce waste. When talking about the built environment, it is more relevant to think of these in two separate categories —the first being “reduce,” which is discussed in chapter 4, and the second , “reuse, restore, retrofit,” which is the subject of this chapter. Restore and retrofit are the built environment equivalents of recycle, a strategy that has considerable potential for carbon-efficiency when applied to buildings and neighborhoods. Our decision to leave out recycle as it applies to materials and subsystems is a deliberate one. While recycling reduces landfill waste and, in some cases, reduces the energy needed to produce new materials, recycling of building materials is generally very energy and labor intensive. This is not exclusively a built-environment problem. The increasing prevalence (and perceived virtue) of recycling over the past several years has overshadowed awareness that significant energy is often required in the process. Recycling a plastic water bottle is probably better than sending it to a landfill but certainly not as beneficial as using a reusable bottle or cup. For some materials in some places, maintainCHAPTEr 5 buIlT To lAsT I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use. —Mother Teresa BUILT TO LAST 65 ing the best environmental balance (accounting for landfill and energy use) actually means shifting away from recycling. About five years ago the City of Amsterdam—an early leader in recycling —abolished its curbside garbage and organic waste pick-up in most parts of the city. The city’s rigorous analysis showed that picking up these items was much more energy intensive than they had realized. They also found that when people perceive recycling as a positive behavior, they tend to generate more waste overall. In Amsterdam today citizens can only recycle their larger plastics, and only by returning them to the point of purchase for a refund of deposit. Cans are not recycled at all, and perhaps as a result of this, cans are not very heavily used. Amsterdam residents can still recycle glass and paper by bringing them to the very conveniently located garbage and recycling dropoff points. In contrast with recycling, reuse consumes much less energy because products are not entirely reprocessed. Reuse of products like refillable glass beer bottles is quite resource and cost efficient but only really works when products and equipment are highly standardized, and when the means of compliance are widely understood and practiced among both producers and consumers. In the built environment, where projects are usually created one at a time over a number of years by many different teams of people, these characteristics are generally not present. It takes more design ingenuity and responsiveness to incorporate old materials or systems, such as brick walls, beams, or other infrastructure into new or retrofit projects. Clearly, a design process that identifies opportunities for reuse upfront and not as an afterthought will be far more successful in facilitating reuse. Restore and retrofit are concepts that apply more to entire buildings. Since the 1960s, the United States has shifted from a manufacturing-driven economy to a service-based one. Manufacturing and product supply chains that remain competitive have dramatically reduced inventory levels. In the service sectors space per worker has generally decreased, as discussed in chapter 4. As a result, a large stock of old office and industrial buildings and even neighborhoods have become obsolete. These buildings contain a huge amount of embodied energy, are often expensive to tear down, and generate a lot of landfill waste when they are demolished. Unfortunately, few old buildings are successfully restored and returned to use. If we could find ways to galvanize the ingenuity of the real estate industry and the construction supply chain to create new life for old buildings, it could potentially generate tremendous economic returns. In this chapter we’ll look at some of the ways to get there. CHAPTEr 5 66 “Built to last,” our chapter title, is about doing it once and doing it right, so that your product will have value for a long time. Whether you drive a fifteenyear -old Honda Accord, wear your grandfather’s watch, or still use the same toboggan as when you were a child, you know that well-made things last longer . Quality is really just the corollary to reuse. recognizing...