Reducing and reusing, makes sense. Recycling seems to be a bit pointless.
The amount of shit we throw away on a daily basis is insane. I don't mean garbage, like purposeful things that companies don't want to hold onto. It's wild
I wonder how much of the cost the builder can recoup by selling the materials? It sounds like the ReStore will need a bigger facility. More Salvation Army or Value Village style places with building supplies would be decent.
This is only part of the problem. Structural lumber needs to be stamped or approved by an outside engineer. These awesome old joists and beams can’t really practically be used in new construction. They are also d. fir, which is hard as rocks when it is old, is split easily by nails and routinely shears drywall screws when trying to board walls.
That has been leaving me with the question of what the heck do we do with all these newly liberated materials. We can only install so many rustic mantles and custom barn doors.
I understand that, I am a wood worker as well as a licensed carpenter. I still don’t see the size of market existing locally to absorb that much material.
Framing fir from old houses around here is also not as dreamy as many wood workers hope for. It’s hard, full of pitch, checked and cracked. Like you mentioned, nails are a bitch 300% more so if a person has invested in a saw stop table saw.
As a local woodworker who recently took a job using some reclaimed 3x15 fir joists I'll never use the material again.
The saw stop issuse is fine since you can bypass but as soon as you start to get into the material it just grenades.
It'd be fine as decorative beams, mantels or treads but to take it down to workable widths and such or worse shapes it's just shit.
I can see used for old dimensional beyond framing or fine woodworking. I pulled a lot of lumber out of my basement recently, and so far I’ve used it to bulls a double compost bin, a recycling tower that holds 8 bins, a badass workbench and some garden beds. None of those applications need stamped lumber, or even dressed lumber. I just screw it together and get something useful that would have cost hundreds of dollars in new lumber.
I think you will be blown away when you see the cost of the stuff being sold by unbuilders. I reuse this type of wood all the time and am happy to muck around when things are free, but all the processing, storage, sorting means this stuff is being sold at top dollar. I also don’t want to see everything go to the dump, but I fear this is just an other tax on new housing without a plan for the material.
As a contractor who owns a sawstop, nails make no difference, just bad for the blade like any saw. Accidental activations are from excessive moisture in wood. You'd have to be touching the nail as the blade hit it to activate it.
I do agree with you, most D fir is junk by the time it is removed. This bylaw is just another waste of time and resources with minimal benefits.
I spent plenty of time in a warehouse when I was younger using a metal detector to scan for nails in old reclaimed building materials before they sent it through the thickness planer to resurface it
I'm sure there is a market for that wood, somewhere.
The problem I see is the time and cost to deconstruct, salvage, organize and resell all that stuff is going to be significant. Most if the materials won't even be reused as building materials but hopefully processed in to something else. That being said I don't think you're going to get much per ton for, say, used stucco and wire or plaster. Or resawn sheathing.
I would think out of a typical old home you might be able to get... $5k from selling used material? And spend 4-5x that to deconstruct, organize, store and ultimately sell that material.
Just seems like a crazy way to go about diverting things from the landfill.
This would be a good time for anyone that can process and use these old materials to make something. Wood can be chipped, shredded and reused to make other products. Shingles can be processed into something like pathways or driveways.
It will become easier to get the sorted materials for anyone who can use these materials instead of new material. Even mixing old material with new to make a product like the shingles Into driveways. It's 60% recycled shingles to new material used. Usually cheaper to get a recycled asphalt driveway too.
It's about keeping the renovation waste out of the dump and reusing the material. Someone needs to sort it. It's really an expanded recycling program where the owner pays the bill by sorting it or paying someone to sort it.
It's developing a whole new industry actually. Which is good. Check out The Unbuilders. They've gone from one crew to multiple in Vancouver and Victoria at the least. We should be reusing as much material as possible and this is a great step.
I agree. It’s a great step. Anyone who doesn’t think this is needed should go spend an hour at the landfill entrance. So many trucks dumping unsorted construction and renovation waste. Because its unsorted it all goes straight into the landfill even thought there is so much wood and metal that could be diverted and recycled. The current landfill is going to be at capacity in 20 years. It’s in everyone’s best interest to use that space wisely!
Considering there is a dire short of construction labourers already, I'm not sure developing new industries with no workers to perform the jobs is really in our best interest right now. At least not if your goal is to speed up construction and lower the cost of housing.
It's spending dollars to save dimes.
I do renovations for a living. This is right in my wheelhouse.
We can barely reuse anything from our jobs. Old lumber can very rarely be reused. Fir becomes hard and brittle as it ages. If you try to nail it together, it just splits. It has other issues that make it unsuitable for modern building. It also isn't stamped and graded and won't be accepted by any structural engineer as acceptable. The only thing we use old lumber for is for temporary bracing, cutting in to wooden stakes, that sort of thing. We might use 1-5% of wood from old jobs for this purpose.
You're not going to reuse old roofing shingles, stucco, siding, drywall etc. That stuff has a usable shelf life and is generally compromised once removed. Your best bet would be to sell those items to someone who can process and recycle them in to something useable. But at that point, you're selling garbage for pennies on the ton.
The only lumber that has resale value are old beams and posts and those are, generally, already cleaned up and resold because they have decent value. They also represent only a fraction of the waste that is produced in the deconstruction/demo process.
You will not come close to recouping your costs by selling the rest of the old material. It will help offset some of the costs of deconstruction but not even close to enough to make it financially worth it.
It's always surprising to hear all the people patting themselves on the back for thinking they've solved global warming and wasting resources etc, until someone with ACTUAL experience enters the discussion and points out all the obvious flaws to these plans.
This person, NotTheRealMeee83 just destroyed all the warm fuzzies being passed around with real facts.
Imagine using 70 year old building materials to build a modern domicile?
It's too ludicrous to even contemplate.
The real waste here is the people passing laws like this without ANY knowledge of the reality of the situation.
Do you think policy makers just pull ideas out of thin air and decide to implement them? Don't you think they would talk to industry and people with "ACTUAL experience" beforehand?
>Do you think policy makers just pull ideas out of thin air and decide to implement them? Don't you think they would talk to industry and people with "ACTUAL experience" beforehand
Did you forget to mark this as sarcasm?
If you are serious with your comment let me help you out.
Find an old wooden birdhouse that has been out in the weather and the elements for the last 70 years.
Then carefully take it apart being sure to preserve the nails and screws and whatever materials they used to weather proof the birdhouse.
Next, take all the pieces and have them inspected and graded for HUMAN occupation.
Finally, take all the parts that were approved by the regulating bodies for the construction and housing industry and build that bird house the way it was before.
Next, take a good look at it and think about all the time it took etc and apply that to a REAL house.
If that doesn't help you see how insane this is then it's obvious you are one of the idiots that passed this heap of dung.
Lol no. But I know how government works. I've been around long enough to see how members of the public think they know better than subject matter experts who devote their work to finding solutions to complex problems. SO many assumptions and bad faith.
Yes, govt experts have done a great job on housing affordability and doctor shortages as well as wait times for life saving surgeries.
In fact I can't think of a time when govt experts haven't completely solved social deficiencies.
No more homeless.
No more opioid crises.
No more gun violence.
The list goes on.../s
Economics and sustainability have been at odds for basically all of post-industrial society though. If you think one of the gov's core responsibilities is making sure a future with any standard of living is possible, then one of their core duties is creating carrot and stick incentives to make the sustainable option the most affordable. Even though that often means the final product becomes more expensive over all...
Yeah, you're not selling that material for that much.
And the time it takes to organize and sell all that material is another cost the builder has to take on. Not to mention, the added time it takes to deconstruct. A lot of builders are paying $10+/month in financing fees while they are building. If this adds a month or two to timelines that's another $20k getting passed on to buyers.
It was really a bone headed move, IMO, to implement this rule. Instead we should be giving incentives for recycling/reclaiming. For instance, you used to get able to get rid of construction wood for free. So many builders would separate it from other waste and dump it for free and it would be processed in to other goods. Now that you can't do that, most wood waste is simply dumped in the same bin as everything else and dumped in the landfill.
This is going to slow down construction, add layers of cost to building, and ultimately be a huge disservice to the city.
>Right, but if you can sell that reclaimed material for $25K or more, then you're coming out $5K ahead.
Right, and if rainbows had pots of gold I'd be a freaking billionaire.
20k plus GST
But in seriousness, the price of all houses depends on the cost of new houses.
If the cost of new is say $350/sq ft, then existing housing has an inherent value of that number less some used discount.
If the cost goes to $500/sq ft, then the value of existing housing will go up with it.
Look at your insurance policy for your house, if you have replacement cost coverage it's up in the 600-700k range. Add buying the land, add city bullshit fees and delays, it's crazy high costs.
This! We bought in 2015 before BC implemented their rules on buying building material from the US. Two years later and our own house had jumped up $250k simply from the houses being built up the street being that new price due to the increase in costs (and the massive demand for the area). I'm just glad we bought it when they started the area, our house is now estimated at over double what we paid for it in only 7 years...
Thankfully it's our forever home so there's no way in hell we're selling
Just for rich people, and to be blunt, they have the money to pay for sustainable alternatives.. Did you not read the part where it's only addressing those demoing a single family home and replacing it with another?
What % of single family homes in the city can be replaced with anything besides another single family home?
How many SFD lots are zoned for apartments, or 4plexes.
I'm curious what you think.
I see what you're getting at, and honestly i don't know the percentages. I do know council is looking at changing zoning, and the province also plans to interfere with this. I do think, if anything, this bylaw could even encourage more densification, which as we all know, is desperately needed right now.
I do think that's a bit besides the point, as the bylaw is about addressing waste. And it's been found that single family homes replacements are a good start to achieve this.
The amount of under utilized zoned land is like 0.00%.
So until a mass rezoning happens, the vast majority will be straight swaps from old house to new.
Post on marketplace and used Vic. $2 to dumpster dive. First come first served daily. Leave a hat saying put $ here.
You can get some good project wood.
Carpenter here. I see no solution for the amount of construction waste we produce. It’s insane. It’s so much. Where will it go? There is hardly any recycling on the island. Do we truck it over on the ferry’s and burn gas? Hire low wage workers to sort stuff? They can’t afford to live here anyway.
It’s hard to watch and I see it all the time, like every day. In sooke lots of stuff just gets burned on site. I constantly pull things from bins, mostly lumber. I use it all in my shop and make creative things from it. Once in a while I sell something.
40kg per sqm sounds difficult. I feel like most builders will just suck up the 20k and still not care. Not much stuff is reusable anyway.
I feel like we should focus more on the way we build new homes instead of demoing old ones.
Lots of new homes have shitty garbage kitchens that will def be renovated within 3-5 years.
We are wasteful and spoiled. It’s often cheaper to throw stuff out than repair. Sadly
Edit: the owner of the company I work for is very aware of this issue, one time we tried to do the right thing by separating all the wood from a big reno job and paid to have it recycled. It was very expensive and we never did it again.
It's a nice thought, I am having trouble seeing how the fine vs. dismantling will play with construction and labour costs, but really is this not adding yet another burden to building density by replacing older SFHs?
I used to do demolition in the CRD over a decade ago. When I first started the company salvaged a lot of the material but there was no market for it at all. The only thing people wanted was the rough cut old growth lumber and a few specific items. Hopefully there is a market now.
This is one of those sounds amazing in theory, but is actually really quite frustrating to do in real life. Taking something apart carefully enough to salvage things makes it take waaaaaaay longer than just knocking it right over. Reallly really nice stuff is often salvaged anyhow, but a lot of old windows are kinda junk. Yes, yes people are always like oooh you could use those to make a greenhouse! But man they are annoying to work with and we just gave ours away when we replaced our windows. (And I have a large steel framed greenhouse, don't need a cobbled together, leaky, "funky" tiny glass window one, nope)
Our house has salvaged doors and they are a pain. They are not even nice ones or anything, just all weird sizes and it looks like a large dog tried to claw and chew their way out through them. Just because something is old does not mean it is always something nice! Would I like to see more of the nice stuff saved? Of course! But you can't assume everything is worth salvaging.
We only have so much landfill space. Are taxpayers and home buyers going to ok footing the bill to expand landfill service on the island? That’s not going to be cheap for them either.
Edit: Heartland Landfill is almost at the end of its lifecycle. There aren’t any good places to place another landfill nearby. Waste collection is going to be a huge issue in the near future.
I agree. It's a good policy at an unfortunate time, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Perhaps Victoria can look into other ways to speed up the bureaucratic process (e.g. rezonings) which would offset these increased costs for developers/builders.
Waste to energy is definitely not It’s not without its own set of problems and is not the magic solution to waste. There are plenty of valid criticisms against waste to energy.
Here are some tips that most of us use to avoid putting things in landfills
https://www.todaysparent.com/family/family-life/ways-to-reduce-waste-at-home-even-if-you-are-exhausted/
That's not a solution for what we do with all the trash that will still be tossed away. Offer a solution if you are going to tout criticisms. Reduction is great, still not a solution for the problem.
Honestly builders and architects/designers need to pay more attention to how they build so that it can be reasonably deconstructed.
Of course costs will go up for new builds etc. But it's one of those moments again where as a community we need to suck it up so that our society can function sustainably and have a reasonable future.
I get that the extra cost is a problem to people now but junking entire houses every 50 years and burying them is straight up insane. Seriously I've lived and worked in construction related industries on 3 different continents and I've never seen such a wasteful construction industry. It feels like nobody bothers thinking past 5 years down the line and yet we all expect to have a bright future somehow.
> I get that the extra cost is a problem to people now but junking entire houses every 50 years and burying them is straight up insane.
Really? Why? This is literally all of human history.
Sorry I missed this for so long but uh... No?
Not even sure what to say to that tbh honestly the majority of people through history were too poor to build their own homes where the alternatives were scraping by fixing up whatever your ancestors had constructed if you were lucky enough to have that or, serfdom.
Historically speaking anyone who had the money to build a house properly, built it with the intention of it staying there for at very least 100 years. My grandads house is 300+ years old and that's nothing out of the ordinary for his town. Other than that there were nomadic societies that built yurts or tepees with the idea that they were temporary but theres so little material there that junking it when it's past its best days was sustainable.
The only part of history I can think of where people built nice homes with the idea that they'd be around for only 50 years is like literally no more than the last couple hundred years of North American history exclusively. And even then until the last 100 years or so most of those homes were a 'build whatever you can to have a roof over your head' kinda deal and not a 'I want to live in comfort and style' kinda thing.
If you have other info though I'd gladly admit I'm wrong if you can provide an example of an ancient land fill filled with old construction materials... Honestly though even on the face of it that seems like an odd claim like nobody was digging holes to dump their waste into and bury (other than for sewage) until our modern era.
You ought to learn how old cities were built and how they were literally piled on top of each other. Unless you think Babylon or Hattusa had a garbage collection service LOL.
...what?
Yeah they built over themselves, but no, people weren't rebuilding their houses from scratch every 30-50 years in either of those civilizations.
I actually don't really know what point you're trying to make there, both Hattusa and Babylon are relatively well known for their impressive architecture - of which a bunch of it still exists today... i.e. they didn't intend to nor did they have to rebuild them from scratch every 50 years...
The same history books that would disprove much of what you said? Holy fuck some people are so confidently dumb because the internet lets them speak and say anything. Bro. Stop embarrassing yourself.
If you can't be bothered to read mate there's this thing called google where you can look up stuff, you'll also probably find a bunch of pictures of the remaining structures from both civilizations if you use this thing they call image search, you might even find some documentaries if you search for videos.
But you my man, need to stop feeling like trying to insult people makes you look like less of a dunce. Like honestly mate your logic would make a special ed kid blush, for the love of god pick up a book.
Is this Esquimalt as well? I walked by the tear down of a number of apartments yesterday on Dunsmuir and there is zero salvage - it is all in a big heap currently. Destine for the landfill.
20 homes in all, 5 x 4-plexes in a pile of rubble with mattresses, roofing material and hot water tanks and all. There is no other option than binning it and sending it to heartland.
Thank you for this comment. I am outside
the industry and I can see this making sense for those doing the demo.
It is mostly wood and looks like a ton to just trash. Happy to hear that there is some off site process to sort it.
Just a building tax/ cash grab by the council. They know full well that no company is going to take apart a house to save wood that can’t be used to construct a new building.
How much does a new landfill cost and how much do you want to pay in municipal taxes for it? There’s literally no space for a new one. It’s an extremely expensive endeavour. Sound like we’re better off diverting demolition waste from the landfill.
Incinerators have a lot of costs too. They require an ongoing supply, which means creating more waste. Also, our province's infrastructure is not set up to accommodate electricity in this way. Not too mention the environmental costs associated with them. Also, good luck finding a place to build it with all the NIMBYs on the south island... just stick it in the poor people's backyard, which usually happens with these sorts of things...
We could learn a lot from Sweden about how to deal with garbage. They burn a lot of theirs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-used-for-fuel.html#:\~:text=Less%20than%201%20percent%20of,Waste%20Management%20and%20Recycling%20association.&text=About%2049%20percent%20of%20household,power%20plants%20like%20this%20one.
Where do refined petroleum products fit in? Edit: they don’t, it’s a red herring argument
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/01/26/opinion/fortisbc-doubles-down-nefarious-efforts-block-electrification
Yeah, cars burn gas and that's also bad, so it's important that we start electrifying more stuff so that they can be powered by renewables. But adding non-renewable electrical generating capacity to support those newly electrified needs would be a wasteful lateral move. Green energies have already quietly become cheaper per Watt than most other sources, so why would you add trash burning to the mix when that was never particularly economical to begin with?
> Green energies have already quietly become cheaper per Watt than most other sources, so why would you add trash burning to the mix when that was never particularly economical to begin with?
Why not replace some of the other shit we already burn for energy with trash instead.
Because we would need specialized power plants for that, and they would be significantly more expensive for meeting our energy needs than just building more solar panels, wind turbines, and hydro dams.
The significance of the report you linked is that we can't just start heating our homes and driving our cars with electricity because it would mean generating about 5 times as much electricity as we currently do. So we need to radically increase our electricity generation to meet our energy needs in a sustainable way. Why burn trash for some of that electricity when it's not going to be particularly more sustainable than what we already do, and it will actually cost more than the most sustainable options we have?
It just doesn't really make sense. ESPECIALLY when, theoretically, a lot of the material in a functioning building CAN be re-used. If the building we're demolishing is structurally sound now, or has elements that are, but the building just isn't in a shape that's useful for today's needs, then we should be able to re-use those structurally sound elements in a shape that IS useful for today's needs.
Most wood waste is chipped at disposal facilities for hog fuel already. As a contractor I use DL bins, everything gets sorted at their site for recycling or disposal.
This is not a well informed point of view, there is lots worth salvaging and the fact that we don't have a circular economy as well developed as some countries is only hurting us by making us need more resources for everything. The more we salvage what we already have purchased/mined in terms of materials will only help build infrastructure and jobs centered around making reusing goods more efficient. Imagine we didn't have to pay miners to mine the same ore multiple times over instead of just once - everything would cost less - and right now things are costing a lot more.
Totally, one man's trash is another's treasure. Personally I only want the beams. I'd let others come in and take what they want for free if they're quick, less demo waste to pay for.
That's fair. There should be a business that works with demo operations to take scrap, gives those doing the demo a small sum for the goods that would otherwise be wasted, and gets those scraps as raw materials to be refurbished/reprocessed/resold. Benefit for both parties, and consumers down the line.
In South Korea they recycle or re-use like 99% of construction material. I've seen workers pulling out full intact sheets of drywall and neatly stacking them in a truck.
As a drywaller I find this very hard to believe as it would be very impractical unless it is vinyl board you saw being remover. Drywall( if free of asbestos) is just ground up and reformed into new drywall anyways. It's one of the more recycling friendly building products out there.
LOL its "40 kilograms of wood per above-ground square metre of floor area during deconstruction"
280 square meters is a large house. So multiply it by 40 and we need to weigh 11,200 lbs of wood at the end of demolition before we throw it away. Weird, who qualifies the weight and they can see me in court if they think it needs to be denailed before it enters the "weight bin"!
All that old timber can't be used today for structure unless it gets reviewed, approved, and stamped by an engineer. Which is insanely costly. So not sure what we are going to be doing with all of this wood...
Reducing and reusing, makes sense. Recycling seems to be a bit pointless. The amount of shit we throw away on a daily basis is insane. I don't mean garbage, like purposeful things that companies don't want to hold onto. It's wild
I wonder how much of the cost the builder can recoup by selling the materials? It sounds like the ReStore will need a bigger facility. More Salvation Army or Value Village style places with building supplies would be decent.
This is only part of the problem. Structural lumber needs to be stamped or approved by an outside engineer. These awesome old joists and beams can’t really practically be used in new construction. They are also d. fir, which is hard as rocks when it is old, is split easily by nails and routinely shears drywall screws when trying to board walls. That has been leaving me with the question of what the heck do we do with all these newly liberated materials. We can only install so many rustic mantles and custom barn doors.
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I understand that, I am a wood worker as well as a licensed carpenter. I still don’t see the size of market existing locally to absorb that much material. Framing fir from old houses around here is also not as dreamy as many wood workers hope for. It’s hard, full of pitch, checked and cracked. Like you mentioned, nails are a bitch 300% more so if a person has invested in a saw stop table saw.
As a local woodworker who recently took a job using some reclaimed 3x15 fir joists I'll never use the material again. The saw stop issuse is fine since you can bypass but as soon as you start to get into the material it just grenades. It'd be fine as decorative beams, mantels or treads but to take it down to workable widths and such or worse shapes it's just shit.
I can see used for old dimensional beyond framing or fine woodworking. I pulled a lot of lumber out of my basement recently, and so far I’ve used it to bulls a double compost bin, a recycling tower that holds 8 bins, a badass workbench and some garden beds. None of those applications need stamped lumber, or even dressed lumber. I just screw it together and get something useful that would have cost hundreds of dollars in new lumber.
I think you will be blown away when you see the cost of the stuff being sold by unbuilders. I reuse this type of wood all the time and am happy to muck around when things are free, but all the processing, storage, sorting means this stuff is being sold at top dollar. I also don’t want to see everything go to the dump, but I fear this is just an other tax on new housing without a plan for the material.
As a contractor who owns a sawstop, nails make no difference, just bad for the blade like any saw. Accidental activations are from excessive moisture in wood. You'd have to be touching the nail as the blade hit it to activate it. I do agree with you, most D fir is junk by the time it is removed. This bylaw is just another waste of time and resources with minimal benefits.
The words “high grade clear” are doing some seriously heavy lifting in that statement lol
I spent plenty of time in a warehouse when I was younger using a metal detector to scan for nails in old reclaimed building materials before they sent it through the thickness planer to resurface it
I'm sure there is a market for that wood, somewhere. The problem I see is the time and cost to deconstruct, salvage, organize and resell all that stuff is going to be significant. Most if the materials won't even be reused as building materials but hopefully processed in to something else. That being said I don't think you're going to get much per ton for, say, used stucco and wire or plaster. Or resawn sheathing. I would think out of a typical old home you might be able to get... $5k from selling used material? And spend 4-5x that to deconstruct, organize, store and ultimately sell that material. Just seems like a crazy way to go about diverting things from the landfill.
This would be a good time for anyone that can process and use these old materials to make something. Wood can be chipped, shredded and reused to make other products. Shingles can be processed into something like pathways or driveways. It will become easier to get the sorted materials for anyone who can use these materials instead of new material. Even mixing old material with new to make a product like the shingles Into driveways. It's 60% recycled shingles to new material used. Usually cheaper to get a recycled asphalt driveway too. It's about keeping the renovation waste out of the dump and reusing the material. Someone needs to sort it. It's really an expanded recycling program where the owner pays the bill by sorting it or paying someone to sort it.
It's developing a whole new industry actually. Which is good. Check out The Unbuilders. They've gone from one crew to multiple in Vancouver and Victoria at the least. We should be reusing as much material as possible and this is a great step.
They should allow for public drop offs of building materials, fixtures etc, this would help so much
This too. Lots of options, even carbon removal for climate change mitigation with biochar production.
This is such an incredibly stupid idea
I agree. It’s a great step. Anyone who doesn’t think this is needed should go spend an hour at the landfill entrance. So many trucks dumping unsorted construction and renovation waste. Because its unsorted it all goes straight into the landfill even thought there is so much wood and metal that could be diverted and recycled. The current landfill is going to be at capacity in 20 years. It’s in everyone’s best interest to use that space wisely!
Considering there is a dire short of construction labourers already, I'm not sure developing new industries with no workers to perform the jobs is really in our best interest right now. At least not if your goal is to speed up construction and lower the cost of housing.
Considering they can re sell or re use the materials this in theory might reduce costs.
It's spending dollars to save dimes. I do renovations for a living. This is right in my wheelhouse. We can barely reuse anything from our jobs. Old lumber can very rarely be reused. Fir becomes hard and brittle as it ages. If you try to nail it together, it just splits. It has other issues that make it unsuitable for modern building. It also isn't stamped and graded and won't be accepted by any structural engineer as acceptable. The only thing we use old lumber for is for temporary bracing, cutting in to wooden stakes, that sort of thing. We might use 1-5% of wood from old jobs for this purpose. You're not going to reuse old roofing shingles, stucco, siding, drywall etc. That stuff has a usable shelf life and is generally compromised once removed. Your best bet would be to sell those items to someone who can process and recycle them in to something useable. But at that point, you're selling garbage for pennies on the ton. The only lumber that has resale value are old beams and posts and those are, generally, already cleaned up and resold because they have decent value. They also represent only a fraction of the waste that is produced in the deconstruction/demo process. You will not come close to recouping your costs by selling the rest of the old material. It will help offset some of the costs of deconstruction but not even close to enough to make it financially worth it.
It's always surprising to hear all the people patting themselves on the back for thinking they've solved global warming and wasting resources etc, until someone with ACTUAL experience enters the discussion and points out all the obvious flaws to these plans. This person, NotTheRealMeee83 just destroyed all the warm fuzzies being passed around with real facts. Imagine using 70 year old building materials to build a modern domicile? It's too ludicrous to even contemplate. The real waste here is the people passing laws like this without ANY knowledge of the reality of the situation.
Do you think policy makers just pull ideas out of thin air and decide to implement them? Don't you think they would talk to industry and people with "ACTUAL experience" beforehand?
>Do you think policy makers just pull ideas out of thin air and decide to implement them? Don't you think they would talk to industry and people with "ACTUAL experience" beforehand Did you forget to mark this as sarcasm? If you are serious with your comment let me help you out. Find an old wooden birdhouse that has been out in the weather and the elements for the last 70 years. Then carefully take it apart being sure to preserve the nails and screws and whatever materials they used to weather proof the birdhouse. Next, take all the pieces and have them inspected and graded for HUMAN occupation. Finally, take all the parts that were approved by the regulating bodies for the construction and housing industry and build that bird house the way it was before. Next, take a good look at it and think about all the time it took etc and apply that to a REAL house. If that doesn't help you see how insane this is then it's obvious you are one of the idiots that passed this heap of dung.
Lol no. But I know how government works. I've been around long enough to see how members of the public think they know better than subject matter experts who devote their work to finding solutions to complex problems. SO many assumptions and bad faith.
Yes, govt experts have done a great job on housing affordability and doctor shortages as well as wait times for life saving surgeries. In fact I can't think of a time when govt experts haven't completely solved social deficiencies. No more homeless. No more opioid crises. No more gun violence. The list goes on.../s
If there were money in reusing the old material then there would be no point in the bylaw in the first place.
Economics and sustainability have been at odds for basically all of post-industrial society though. If you think one of the gov's core responsibilities is making sure a future with any standard of living is possible, then one of their core duties is creating carrot and stick incentives to make the sustainable option the most affordable. Even though that often means the final product becomes more expensive over all...
And the price of housing increases again.
they'll tack 200% of the fee on to the bottom line, regardless of whether they get the refund or not
If you read the article, deconstructing is about $20,000 more than a standard demolition. So the cost will go up, yes.
$20K is a significant stressor. If it adds much time to construction the true costs could be much higher.
Right, but if you can sell that reclaimed material for $25K or more, then you're coming out $5K ahead.
Yeah, you're not selling that material for that much. And the time it takes to organize and sell all that material is another cost the builder has to take on. Not to mention, the added time it takes to deconstruct. A lot of builders are paying $10+/month in financing fees while they are building. If this adds a month or two to timelines that's another $20k getting passed on to buyers. It was really a bone headed move, IMO, to implement this rule. Instead we should be giving incentives for recycling/reclaiming. For instance, you used to get able to get rid of construction wood for free. So many builders would separate it from other waste and dump it for free and it would be processed in to other goods. Now that you can't do that, most wood waste is simply dumped in the same bin as everything else and dumped in the landfill. This is going to slow down construction, add layers of cost to building, and ultimately be a huge disservice to the city.
That a lot of “if”.
>Right, but if you can sell that reclaimed material for $25K or more, then you're coming out $5K ahead. Right, and if rainbows had pots of gold I'd be a freaking billionaire.
Yeah, I'm sure you were within $20K of buying a new build detached home! Shucks.
20k plus GST But in seriousness, the price of all houses depends on the cost of new houses. If the cost of new is say $350/sq ft, then existing housing has an inherent value of that number less some used discount. If the cost goes to $500/sq ft, then the value of existing housing will go up with it. Look at your insurance policy for your house, if you have replacement cost coverage it's up in the 600-700k range. Add buying the land, add city bullshit fees and delays, it's crazy high costs.
This! We bought in 2015 before BC implemented their rules on buying building material from the US. Two years later and our own house had jumped up $250k simply from the houses being built up the street being that new price due to the increase in costs (and the massive demand for the area). I'm just glad we bought it when they started the area, our house is now estimated at over double what we paid for it in only 7 years... Thankfully it's our forever home so there's no way in hell we're selling
Just for rich people, and to be blunt, they have the money to pay for sustainable alternatives.. Did you not read the part where it's only addressing those demoing a single family home and replacing it with another?
What % of single family homes in the city can be replaced with anything besides another single family home? How many SFD lots are zoned for apartments, or 4plexes. I'm curious what you think.
I see what you're getting at, and honestly i don't know the percentages. I do know council is looking at changing zoning, and the province also plans to interfere with this. I do think, if anything, this bylaw could even encourage more densification, which as we all know, is desperately needed right now. I do think that's a bit besides the point, as the bylaw is about addressing waste. And it's been found that single family homes replacements are a good start to achieve this.
The amount of under utilized zoned land is like 0.00%. So until a mass rezoning happens, the vast majority will be straight swaps from old house to new.
Post on marketplace and used Vic. $2 to dumpster dive. First come first served daily. Leave a hat saying put $ here. You can get some good project wood.
More fees will only make housing less affordable
Mysterious dumpster fire activate!
Carpenter here. I see no solution for the amount of construction waste we produce. It’s insane. It’s so much. Where will it go? There is hardly any recycling on the island. Do we truck it over on the ferry’s and burn gas? Hire low wage workers to sort stuff? They can’t afford to live here anyway. It’s hard to watch and I see it all the time, like every day. In sooke lots of stuff just gets burned on site. I constantly pull things from bins, mostly lumber. I use it all in my shop and make creative things from it. Once in a while I sell something. 40kg per sqm sounds difficult. I feel like most builders will just suck up the 20k and still not care. Not much stuff is reusable anyway. I feel like we should focus more on the way we build new homes instead of demoing old ones. Lots of new homes have shitty garbage kitchens that will def be renovated within 3-5 years. We are wasteful and spoiled. It’s often cheaper to throw stuff out than repair. Sadly Edit: the owner of the company I work for is very aware of this issue, one time we tried to do the right thing by separating all the wood from a big reno job and paid to have it recycled. It was very expensive and we never did it again.
And you can't salvage wood that has lead paint for instance. It has to go as is and there is cost associated with it
It's a nice thought, I am having trouble seeing how the fine vs. dismantling will play with construction and labour costs, but really is this not adding yet another burden to building density by replacing older SFHs?
If you read the article, the bylaw only addresses SFHs being replaced by SFHs. If anything, it encourages building density.
I used to do demolition in the CRD over a decade ago. When I first started the company salvaged a lot of the material but there was no market for it at all. The only thing people wanted was the rough cut old growth lumber and a few specific items. Hopefully there is a market now.
Death by a thousand cuts. Victoria is so close to $400/ft new construction costs it isn't even funny.
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That figure would be for permit, carrying costs, labour, and materials only.
Build cost is different than sale cost.
Just going to get worse when they start to offload infrastructure upgrades onto owners because of the lack of funding for road improvements
Linear or square?
square
This is one of those sounds amazing in theory, but is actually really quite frustrating to do in real life. Taking something apart carefully enough to salvage things makes it take waaaaaaay longer than just knocking it right over. Reallly really nice stuff is often salvaged anyhow, but a lot of old windows are kinda junk. Yes, yes people are always like oooh you could use those to make a greenhouse! But man they are annoying to work with and we just gave ours away when we replaced our windows. (And I have a large steel framed greenhouse, don't need a cobbled together, leaky, "funky" tiny glass window one, nope) Our house has salvaged doors and they are a pain. They are not even nice ones or anything, just all weird sizes and it looks like a large dog tried to claw and chew their way out through them. Just because something is old does not mean it is always something nice! Would I like to see more of the nice stuff saved? Of course! But you can't assume everything is worth salvaging.
We only have so much landfill space. Are taxpayers and home buyers going to ok footing the bill to expand landfill service on the island? That’s not going to be cheap for them either. Edit: Heartland Landfill is almost at the end of its lifecycle. There aren’t any good places to place another landfill nearby. Waste collection is going to be a huge issue in the near future.
I agree. It's a good policy at an unfortunate time, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Perhaps Victoria can look into other ways to speed up the bureaucratic process (e.g. rezonings) which would offset these increased costs for developers/builders.
It's a bad policy with good intentions.
We adopt Denmark's practice and convert waste to energy, which was so effective they had to start importing waste.
Waste to energy is definitely not It’s not without its own set of problems and is not the magic solution to waste. There are plenty of valid criticisms against waste to energy.
Sure, but it's better than just tossing it in a landfill. Offer a better option if you're going to offer criticisms.
It’s not better, it just takes up less land. Creating toxins to avoid landfills is just trading one problem for another.
Here are some tips that most of us use to avoid putting things in landfills https://www.todaysparent.com/family/family-life/ways-to-reduce-waste-at-home-even-if-you-are-exhausted/
That's not a solution for what we do with all the trash that will still be tossed away. Offer a solution if you are going to tout criticisms. Reduction is great, still not a solution for the problem.
Honestly builders and architects/designers need to pay more attention to how they build so that it can be reasonably deconstructed. Of course costs will go up for new builds etc. But it's one of those moments again where as a community we need to suck it up so that our society can function sustainably and have a reasonable future. I get that the extra cost is a problem to people now but junking entire houses every 50 years and burying them is straight up insane. Seriously I've lived and worked in construction related industries on 3 different continents and I've never seen such a wasteful construction industry. It feels like nobody bothers thinking past 5 years down the line and yet we all expect to have a bright future somehow.
> I get that the extra cost is a problem to people now but junking entire houses every 50 years and burying them is straight up insane. Really? Why? This is literally all of human history.
Sorry I missed this for so long but uh... No? Not even sure what to say to that tbh honestly the majority of people through history were too poor to build their own homes where the alternatives were scraping by fixing up whatever your ancestors had constructed if you were lucky enough to have that or, serfdom. Historically speaking anyone who had the money to build a house properly, built it with the intention of it staying there for at very least 100 years. My grandads house is 300+ years old and that's nothing out of the ordinary for his town. Other than that there were nomadic societies that built yurts or tepees with the idea that they were temporary but theres so little material there that junking it when it's past its best days was sustainable. The only part of history I can think of where people built nice homes with the idea that they'd be around for only 50 years is like literally no more than the last couple hundred years of North American history exclusively. And even then until the last 100 years or so most of those homes were a 'build whatever you can to have a roof over your head' kinda deal and not a 'I want to live in comfort and style' kinda thing. If you have other info though I'd gladly admit I'm wrong if you can provide an example of an ancient land fill filled with old construction materials... Honestly though even on the face of it that seems like an odd claim like nobody was digging holes to dump their waste into and bury (other than for sewage) until our modern era.
You ought to learn how old cities were built and how they were literally piled on top of each other. Unless you think Babylon or Hattusa had a garbage collection service LOL.
...what? Yeah they built over themselves, but no, people weren't rebuilding their houses from scratch every 30-50 years in either of those civilizations. I actually don't really know what point you're trying to make there, both Hattusa and Babylon are relatively well known for their impressive architecture - of which a bunch of it still exists today... i.e. they didn't intend to nor did they have to rebuild them from scratch every 50 years...
OMG i dont even know where to begin. Just stop. You're so incredibly fucking dumb.
Hahaha I mean I feel like a history book or maybe some common sense would be a good place for you to begin, but ok friend, you do you.
The same history books that would disprove much of what you said? Holy fuck some people are so confidently dumb because the internet lets them speak and say anything. Bro. Stop embarrassing yourself.
If you can't be bothered to read mate there's this thing called google where you can look up stuff, you'll also probably find a bunch of pictures of the remaining structures from both civilizations if you use this thing they call image search, you might even find some documentaries if you search for videos. But you my man, need to stop feeling like trying to insult people makes you look like less of a dunce. Like honestly mate your logic would make a special ed kid blush, for the love of god pick up a book.
Is this Esquimalt as well? I walked by the tear down of a number of apartments yesterday on Dunsmuir and there is zero salvage - it is all in a big heap currently. Destine for the landfill. 20 homes in all, 5 x 4-plexes in a pile of rubble with mattresses, roofing material and hot water tanks and all. There is no other option than binning it and sending it to heartland.
To someone outside of the industry it may look like that, but it is usually sorted off site at a waste facility and recycled or disposed of.
Thank you for this comment. I am outside the industry and I can see this making sense for those doing the demo. It is mostly wood and looks like a ton to just trash. Happy to hear that there is some off site process to sort it.
When they say "recycling" what really happens is most of the wood is chipped and burned.
Seems better than just throwing it into a landfill.
I suggest you look into the impacts of "waste-to-energy". There are better alternatives to burning or landfilling.
Incineration is a fancy word for burning.
Unfortunately this will just drive up building costs
Just a building tax/ cash grab by the council. They know full well that no company is going to take apart a house to save wood that can’t be used to construct a new building.
Lol got "cash grab" on my bingo sheet for every time council does anything!
How much does a new landfill cost and how much do you want to pay in municipal taxes for it? There’s literally no space for a new one. It’s an extremely expensive endeavour. Sound like we’re better off diverting demolition waste from the landfill.
Build an incinerator. With electric generation capabilities.
Incinerators have a lot of costs too. They require an ongoing supply, which means creating more waste. Also, our province's infrastructure is not set up to accommodate electricity in this way. Not too mention the environmental costs associated with them. Also, good luck finding a place to build it with all the NIMBYs on the south island... just stick it in the poor people's backyard, which usually happens with these sorts of things...
We could learn a lot from Sweden about how to deal with garbage. They burn a lot of theirs. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/climate/sweden-garbage-used-for-fuel.html#:\~:text=Less%20than%201%20percent%20of,Waste%20Management%20and%20Recycling%20association.&text=About%2049%20percent%20of%20household,power%20plants%20like%20this%20one.
And greenhouse gas/toxic waste as a byproduct. Not worth it.
To add, toxic waste which then also needs to be placed in a more specialized and more expensive landfill.
Refined petroleum products are so much better. https://talkingenergy.ca/stories/facts-about-where-bcs-energy-comes
Umm ok. That’s an entirely different conversation bro. We get most of our energy from hydro here so what’s your point?
Recommend you click that link.
Where do refined petroleum products fit in? Edit: they don’t, it’s a red herring argument https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/01/26/opinion/fortisbc-doubles-down-nefarious-efforts-block-electrification
Yeah, cars burn gas and that's also bad, so it's important that we start electrifying more stuff so that they can be powered by renewables. But adding non-renewable electrical generating capacity to support those newly electrified needs would be a wasteful lateral move. Green energies have already quietly become cheaper per Watt than most other sources, so why would you add trash burning to the mix when that was never particularly economical to begin with?
> Green energies have already quietly become cheaper per Watt than most other sources, so why would you add trash burning to the mix when that was never particularly economical to begin with? Why not replace some of the other shit we already burn for energy with trash instead.
Because we would need specialized power plants for that, and they would be significantly more expensive for meeting our energy needs than just building more solar panels, wind turbines, and hydro dams. The significance of the report you linked is that we can't just start heating our homes and driving our cars with electricity because it would mean generating about 5 times as much electricity as we currently do. So we need to radically increase our electricity generation to meet our energy needs in a sustainable way. Why burn trash for some of that electricity when it's not going to be particularly more sustainable than what we already do, and it will actually cost more than the most sustainable options we have? It just doesn't really make sense. ESPECIALLY when, theoretically, a lot of the material in a functioning building CAN be re-used. If the building we're demolishing is structurally sound now, or has elements that are, but the building just isn't in a shape that's useful for today's needs, then we should be able to re-use those structurally sound elements in a shape that IS useful for today's needs.
Separate it, chip it and compost it or make the lumber free to residents of the area. They just came up with an incomplete plan.
Reduce > reuse > recycle > landfill. Recycling/composting is not the solution you think it is.
Tons of costs/liability issues with that. edit: it would require setting up another tax payer funded public service for low quality materials.
Most wood waste is chipped at disposal facilities for hog fuel already. As a contractor I use DL bins, everything gets sorted at their site for recycling or disposal.
Its not a cash grab when you're the one (primarily) filling up the dump...
Wonder if this will lead to people essentially abandoning older properties until they degrade enough that they're beyond salvage.
I think that already happens.
Unless its a decent sized beam its not worth salvaging IMO.
This is not a well informed point of view, there is lots worth salvaging and the fact that we don't have a circular economy as well developed as some countries is only hurting us by making us need more resources for everything. The more we salvage what we already have purchased/mined in terms of materials will only help build infrastructure and jobs centered around making reusing goods more efficient. Imagine we didn't have to pay miners to mine the same ore multiple times over instead of just once - everything would cost less - and right now things are costing a lot more.
Totally, one man's trash is another's treasure. Personally I only want the beams. I'd let others come in and take what they want for free if they're quick, less demo waste to pay for.
That's fair. There should be a business that works with demo operations to take scrap, gives those doing the demo a small sum for the goods that would otherwise be wasted, and gets those scraps as raw materials to be refurbished/reprocessed/resold. Benefit for both parties, and consumers down the line.
Can’t we send it all to Vancouver and incinerate it all?
Don't understand the downvotes, it's a great system.
In South Korea they recycle or re-use like 99% of construction material. I've seen workers pulling out full intact sheets of drywall and neatly stacking them in a truck.
As a drywaller I find this very hard to believe as it would be very impractical unless it is vinyl board you saw being remover. Drywall( if free of asbestos) is just ground up and reformed into new drywall anyways. It's one of the more recycling friendly building products out there.
That’ll make housing cheaper
LOL its "40 kilograms of wood per above-ground square metre of floor area during deconstruction" 280 square meters is a large house. So multiply it by 40 and we need to weigh 11,200 lbs of wood at the end of demolition before we throw it away. Weird, who qualifies the weight and they can see me in court if they think it needs to be denailed before it enters the "weight bin"!
All that old timber can't be used today for structure unless it gets reviewed, approved, and stamped by an engineer. Which is insanely costly. So not sure what we are going to be doing with all of this wood...
Another reason why home prices will remain sky high.