Reducing the impacts of construction through reusable wood components

I’m working on a couple build projects this week and I’m hoping to make them as green as possible. One I’m looking at building so that it can be deconstructed and moved if necessary. The other one, I’m hoping to use mostly, or entirely, salvaged wood. This got me thinking about building things generally.

I have talked to theatre people before about set design and how building for reuse takes more time and results in a need for more storage, but can save money in the long run by reducing the supplies needed. I’ve also had the opportunity to talk with a local architect about a cool church rebuild where they were able to use a lot of the interior wood from the original church in building the new one.

So is this happening more widely? Picardo and Hughes (2022) examined nine case studies and interviewed the architects involved. They found three strategies that were being used before or during initial construction and two strategies for refusing materials from old builds. This specifically looked at wood materials.

During initial construction, the fasteners were key because to reuse the wood you have to be able to undo the joints. In my small builds this is the equivalent of using screws rather than nails but in many cases the case studies were using custom fasteners to do this. Having some degree of modularity was also important. This allows for one section to be replaced rather than having to build the whole thing new. And finally prefabricated sections were helpful but the finding was that reuse required the whole section to be reused as is rather than deconstructed further.

For downstream or reusing materials from an old build in a new one the deconstruction methods and storage of the salvaged wood was key. Without strict controls the wood couldn’t be guaranteed as safe for reuse. In addition, the use of the salvaged wood generally had to be included and accounted for in the design phase so that plans could be adapted to allow for it’s use.

There are of course some challenges. It does take more time and the fasteners were often custom. I do wonder though if this was more mainstream if those fasteners could be the new standard. There were also sometimes restrictions because of building codes. For example, reusing framed windows sometimes requires exemption from newer building codes and energy efficiency requirements.

All in all, I think this is an important area for further research. I would love to see it become easier to reuse materials between projects, but my hope would be that these techniques might also support repurposing projects for new uses rather than always rebuilding.

Now I’m off to work on my projects.