Beautiful heart pine trusses, made from salvaged heart pine 2x4s, can be seen here.
There are 230,000 public housing units in the United States that need to come down. How can we transform lives and communities through an ethic of reuse and repurpose?
In Springfield, MA, Pam Howland, 70 years young, refurbishes windows from abandoned factories being repurposed for loft living, removing the windows, stripping and repairing the wood, removing the caulk, refinishing them and replacing the glass, before returning the windows to the repurposed factory, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and preventing the construction of 900 windows – and the consequent carbon footprint arising from their manufacture – in one building alone.
Pam teaches young, single mothers how to do this work. A single, large window generates up to $650 in revenue. Three windows a week is not out of the question, providing a living wage to a single mother who might otherwise struggle in this depressed rust-belt city.
In Philadelphia, PA, Greg Trainor (Philadelphia Community Corps) has bootstrapped a deconstruction business into a job training business. And while their measured output is jobs, they generate materials and rejuvenate neighborhoods in blighted North Philly.
And in Vermont, three friends have come together to create a workers’ cooperative that promises ownership in the business to hired workers within six months to a year of employment, helping the underemployed to gain job skills and capital as they seek to build a future for themselves by reclaiming materials.
For-profit or not-profit, and beyond the ethic of repurpose, reuse and reclaim, every organization in attendance seemed to hold as a fundamental principle the concept of justice: livable wages with benefits; hiring ex-cons, women, POC. Like no other industry in which I’ve ever worked, there is at its core the understanding that sustainability is not just about the environment; it’s about human systems interacting with our environment in a way that enables both the humans and the environment to thrive. I love this place! "
