If you have a healthy social conscience, you recycle your cans, bottles and newspapers. You send old clothes to the thrift store, and might even use your own mug at Starbucks to keep another paper cup from the landfill.
So why not recycle your house?
When Vancouver civil engineer Clay Braziller decided to renovate his 102-year-old home near Fraser and East 30th, he did just that.
While most homeowners renovate with the simple goals of meeting a budget and schedule, Mr. Braziller was on a slightly different mission.
"When I started renovating, I knew I wanted to source local product, I didn't want to use any product that would be emitting gases, and I knew that I wanted to send as little to the dump as possible," says the 46-year-old Montreal native.
Mr. Braziller, who is married with two young children, did an eco-reno that did not involve new stainless steel appliances or a trendy river-rock chimney.
Instead, he reused his kitchen appliances, recycled bricks from his useless old chimney to make a new one, and cut up old fir beams from a northern sawmill to make the flooring.
In 2002, with another child on the way, Mr. Braziller and wife Wendy James decided to gut the entire house. They tore out the small rooms in favour of an open concept, put on a new roof and added a third storey. By the time they were finished, they had an additional 550 square feet for their five-bedroom home. And Mr. Braziller, who oversaw the entire renovation, achieved the addition without drastically altering the traditional look of the home's exterior. The new interior, however, has the calming effect of space and natural light.
Any wood that came out of the demolition was reused for floors, stairs, mouldings, garage siding, furniture, mirror frames and cabinets. The renovation was a gruelling process, and it's still going on.
Lately, Mr. Braziller has been recycling some leftover original flooring to finish his staircase. The project involved cutting off the tongues and grooves, planing the boards to equal thickness and laminating them together. He's now sanding the pieces.
"It's a labour of love," he adds, "because to pay someone to do this - I couldn't do it."
Mario Botero, owner of Vancouver-based Demolition Man, wishes more people went to such lengths to recycle old materials. Mr. Botero, who has demolished buildings for 10 years, has no doubt that perfectly usable materials are being sent to the dump.
"Many things are not being recycled. Why? [Because]it doesn't have too much value in the second-hand market, and unfortunately people don't want to go to the trouble," he says, adding that he's no exception.
"Even me, what I do sometimes, I feel so bad that I just go to Habitat for Humanity and I give them stuff. But many times unfortunately because of the pressure of time, and it's not valuable, you just take it to the dump," Mr. Botero says.
"Right now, there is more money in destroying things and bringing them to the landfill."
If you're willing to invest the sweat, an eco-reno doesn't have to be a costly endeavour, according to those who do it.
Mr. Braziller and Ms. James spent a reasonable $85 a square foot on the reno of their 2,050-sq.-ft. house. And their savings continue: thanks to extensive insulation, double-glazed windows and converting from gas to electric heat (allowing them to heat rooms individually), the family's energy bill is now $1,500 a year. Before their reno, they paid about $2,500 a year for energy in a smaller space.
And then there's the bonus of good karma, Mr. Braziller says. "I need a story to tell," he adds. "I like to tell people where everything came from. I am proud of it. I love my house."
Mr. Braziller used to work with the National Research Council on renewable energy, and his current work involves industrial eco-solutions, so he is well versed in the idea of doing more with less.
He prefers products made in Canada, takes a reusable bag to the grocery store, and ferries his children to daycare on the back of his bike. He has been known to dig up rhododendrons from demolished-house sites and move them to his yard by wheelbarrow. Some of the family's living room furnishings came out of a dumpster, thanks to a neighbour who salvages and refurbishes old furniture.
"My friends laugh at me, but you can't help yourself - you look at the waste," he says, adding with a laugh: "I have realized that I've turned into some kind of eco-freak."
Mr. Braziller isn't alone in his passion for salvaging. It is not uncommon in Vancouver to see resourceful types carting away unwanted bricks and plants from construction sites. Usually with the developer's permission, people will even strip old flooring and mouldings from houses that have a date with the wrecker's backhoe. On Mr. Braziller's street, someone has stripped all the cedar siding from one such house.
"I will show you the two-by-eights that are going to be chucked - they are 24 feet long, they are so beautiful," he says. "There are salvaging companies, but they aren't going to come in for eight pieces of two-by-eights. It's just not worth their time.
"It drives me insane," he continues, "because the houses are perfectly good and the wood over time actually gets stronger."
James Tansey, who holds the chair in business ethics at the University of British Columbia and runs the non-profit Offsetters Climate Neutral Society, approves of such efforts in home renovations, especially for energy conservation.
"You are doing a lot of energy-saving in terms of salvaging the lumber in the first place. And if it's a house from 1912, you should look at the construction and lumber they used then - it's a much higher quality than you find today," says Prof. Tansey, who plans to use tiles made of recycled tires to put a new roof on his Kerrisdale garage.
"People think they are building a better new house, but it's actually much lower in terms of quality," he says.
Prof. Tansey, 34, is so enamoured of older buildings that he invested in a 1912 home with Patrick Lewis, a 56-year-old former cabinetmaker who is now the managing director for the Centre for Applied Ethics at UBC.
With little effort, the two divided the dwelling so that they both have separate, 2,500-square-foot homes for their families. It not only proved to be an economically viable way to live in a desirable neighbourhood, but also meant that every part of the building was used, which might not be the case if a single family lived there.
Mr. Lewis and his wife, Eva, also spend a couple of months a year at their cabin on Thormanby Island. It boasts eight solid-fir doors that Mr. Lewis salvaged from a Kerrisdale house that was about to be torn down ("it's Vancouver - of course it was being torn down," he notes dryly). He fitted the doors inside the cabin and used glass from old glass doors to make windows.
His own preferences aside, Mr. Lewis knows there are energy-efficient, high-quality new homes being built. And he also knows that stripping nails out of old wood is not an option for everybody.
"If you get pleasure out of doing this, then there's something value-added ... but if you aren't handy, or if you don't have time, it can be expensive," he says.
Prof. Tansey also notes that many houses slapped up during the 1950s and '60s were not built with thermal efficiency in mind, so it may prove more environmentally friendly to completely rebuild a house than to simply renovate with salvaged materials.
"By building a house in the right way you can reduce [carbon]emissions by 50 to 80 per cent," he says.
Still, many old houses can keep up to modern needs. Mr. Braziller says he has brought his 1905 house up to the same standard as an energy efficient new home.
Mr. Botero, meanwhile, says a broader eco-answer lies in finding a way to make it easier for consumers to recycle building materials, not only in Vancouver or Canada but around the world as well.
"A lot of people want to buy and a lot of people want to get rid of stuff," he says. "In my opinion the government or somebody should do something about bringing these two parties together.
"Sometimes I feel, 'How cool would it be to have a big ship down on the water you could bring all this stuff to - and send it to all the countries that need it?' "
Kerry Gold