Saving Plastic Bags, Destroying Buildings. Happy Earth Day from the City of Minneapolis!

Happy Earth Day, Citizens of Minneapolis. Your City government wants you to help make our city a Zero Waste city. On the City website, a page is devoted to ways you can be a "Zero Hero" and reduce environmental waste. 

Here are two of the tips offered on the page, with editorial comments highlighted in green: 

Buy It Durable and Maintain It To Last!

Long lasting, durable goods cost more at first but save money in the long run. Zero Heroes find that durable products break down less often too, meaning fewer repair bills. Like old houses built with pride from quality materials.

Creatively Reuse

Zero Hero creativity can play a big role in preventing waste. There are many things around the house that can have new uses.  Like the house itself. 

And here's a third tip I'd like to add:

Don't poison the neighborhood with airborne hazardous materials.

The City is to be commended for its excellent recycling program. But before we congratulate ourselves on saving the Earth by recycling pop cans and composting potato peels, we need to look at a very negative environmental impact that's totally ignored: the demolition of old houses. While the City concerns itself with recycling plastic grocery bags, it approves and encourages the demolition of well-built existing houses. These demolitions--seven in the Wedge alone during the last couple of years--send toxic particulates into the air and many hundreds of tons of building materials into the landfill.  

The energy saved by recycling plastic bags and aluminum cans represents a infinitesimal fraction of the energy saved by recycling buildings. Minneapolis is trashing hundreds of tons of building materials, destroying tons of embodied energy. And to make matters worse, the old buildings are replaced by stick-frame buildings, poorly designed, and thrown up as quickly as possible. Unlike the old houses, the new buildings aren't built to last, only built to last as long as developers and investors can make a buck out of them.  Putting up these new buildings requires the use of new, inferior materials and the energy required for construction--energy that would not have to be used if the old buildings had been recycled.

But you don't have to take my word for it.  A report produced by the Preservation Green Lab of the National Trust for Historic Preservation provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the potential environmental benefit of building reuse. This groundbreaking study concludes that when comparing buildings of equivalent size and function, building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demolition and new construction.

 Some important findings in this study by the National Trust:

The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse

Reuse Matters. Building reuse typically offers greater environmental savings than demolition and new construction. It can take between 10 to 80 years for a new energy efficient building to overcome, through efficient operations, the climate change impacts created by its construction. The study finds that the majority of building types in different climates will take between 20-30 years to compensate for the initial carbon impacts from construction.
Scale Matters. Collectively, building reuse and retrofits substantially reduce climate change impacts. Retrofitting, rather than demolishing and replacing, just 1% of the city of Portland’s office buildings and single family homes over the next ten years would help to meet 15% of their county’s total CO2 reduction targets over the next decade.  
Design Matters. The environmental benefits of reuse are maximized by minimizing the input of new construction materials. Renovation projects that require many new materials can reduce or even negate the benefits of reuse.
 The Bottom Line: Reusing existing buildings is good for the economy, the community and the environment. At a time when our country’s foreclosure and unemployment rates remain high, communities would be wise to reinvest in their existing building stock. Historic rehabilitation has a thirty-two year track record of creating 2 million jobs and generating $90 billion in private investment. Studies show residential rehabilitation creates 50% more jobs than new construction.

Now to turn to the "Don't Poison the Neighborhood" part. . .

A recent toxic demo on the North Side. (Photo by Brian Finstad)

North Side resident Brian Finstad, who recently witnessed a demo on Dupont Avenue with no lead containment (see photo), spent hours contacting various agencies about the toxic cloud spreading through the area. According to Brian, this is "not a problem of permitting, but of practices and enforcement." The negative environmental impact of these lead-spreading demolitions is "one of the great unstudied public health issues of urban neighborhoods." When 2320 and 2316 Colfax Avenue South were demolished, a similar environmental nightmare ensued.  One guy wrecked the houses with a backhoe, while another guy walked around with a garden hose. Pathetic.

A cloud of hazardous particulates floated through the Wedge for three days during the demo of the Orth House. (Photo by Anders Christensen)

So far, the City of Minneapolis has completely disregarded the environmental impact of the demolition of well-built existing houses to construct new middle- and high-density "market rate" apartment buildings. The City hypocritically keeps patting itself on the back for its zero-waste initiative while soldiering on for developers, approving demolitions and ignoring the environmentally harmful effects of these inept, unmonitored demolitions on  neighborhoods.

Until the City takes into consideration the unhealthy and wasteful impact of its market-driven obsession with commercial residential construction, Minneapolis won't be anywhere near achieving "zero waste" status. 

The greenest building is the one already built. Period.

Related links:
Sustainable Communities
Creating Sustainable Communities
Greening Older and Historic Buildings
Preservation Green Lab
National Main Street Center

--T.B.