Build Your Home With Recycled Products

Q. I’m about to start building a summer home and wonder if there are building products made from recycled materials.

A. There sure are! There are products incorporating recycled materials for nearly every component for your home. When considering your options, we suggest you look at three product characteristics carefully: quality, cost and availability. Sometimes shipping a product that is not locally available drives its cost higher than other products that use more of our natural resources. On the other hand, some consumers find they are very sensitive to glues used to manufacture products made from wood chips, laminations, or veneers. They prefer solid wood materials even though this causes greater resource depletion. Meanwhile, the quality of many recycled content products is every bit as good as the conventional alternative while also providing a labor-saving advantage.

Here are some examples of ways recycled materials are used in building components.

Depending on where you live, fly ash, either naturally occurring or as waste from coal-burning plants, can be added to make concrete for your foundation stronger.

You can build your roof structure with panels combining insulation with nail base surfaces from 100 percent recycled newsprint cellulose - no rafters are needed.

Few people realize most metal products available to the housing industry, like aluminum or steel siding or roofing, have high recycled content. While these can also be easily recycled again, it’s also true these materials use quite a bit of energy in the initial extraction as well as refinement.

Perhaps a more attractive alternative would be one of the many fiber-cement composite products now manufactured for both roofing and siding. These combine waste wood fiber with cement and ground sand and offer warranties from 20 to 60 years. Roofing slates are still light enough for conventional roof structures.

For the inside of your home, recycled cellulose has also been combined with gypsum and perlite to make a wall board for interior finish. It doesn’t require taping and there is no paper face to worry about breaking.

Some very attractive carpeting is now made from recycled plastic soda bottles and can be put down over a rubber mat of 100 percent recycled tire rubber on a nice smooth underlayment of mixed waste paper and agricultural fibers.

Recycled windshield glass or fluorescent light tube are used to make floor tiles.

There are also many products high in recycled content that have been around for a long time, such as cellulose or rock wool insulation.

Another common product to consider is one that may not use a lot of recycled material but uses less new material from our resource pool or uses it better. Builders are already familiar with many of these products and choose them because of their cost or labor-saving advantages. These include any of a number of structural building products.

Composite sheet goods from wood chips (or other agricultural fibers like straw), like chip board or oriented strand board (OSB) are commonly used for sheathing or decking.

Wood joists using two pieces of smaller dimension lumber with an OSB or chip board web make long, strong joists that still can be handled by one person.

Headers and beams built up from many thin wood laminations provide great strength and are quite attractive.

One final area is the reuse of actual building components from dismantled buildings. While doors and windows are common, flooring and structural beams are also available. Check your local code jurisdictions about the reuse of such materials.

There are many resources available on resource-efficient building products. Here are just a few:

Directory of Recycled-Content Building Materials, available from the Clean Washington Center, Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development, 2001 Sixth, Suite 2700, Seattle, WA 98121; (206) 587-5520.

A Reference Guide to Resource Efficient Building Elements (GREBE), a reference to manufacturers of resource-efficient building materials. ($25) Updated annually. Available from The Center for Resourceful Building Technology, PO Box 3413, Missoula, MT 59806; (406) 549-7678.

1995 Resources for Environmental Design Index (REDI Guide). Computerized information on recycled, low toxicity, natural and sustainably harvested building materials. Windows and Macintosh versions available. Updated yearly. ($49) Contact: IRIS Communications, Inc., 258 E. 10th, Suite E, Eugene, OR 97401; (800) 346-0104.

The Environmental Building News (EBN). A bimonthly newsletter on environmentally sustainable design and construction. ($60/year) RR 1, Box 161, Brattleboro, VT 05301; (802) 257-7300.

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN, QUESTION & ANSWER - Homewise