Deconstructing Buildings: The Quest for New Life for Old Wood

We bought our living room beams from a local company called Big Timberworks in Gallatin Gateway, Montana, but they came from a factory in Milwaukee. Hudson Hart, one of the company’s CEOs, told me Big Timberworks entered the salvage business in the 1990s because such high-quality fiber was inexpensive and readily available from old Army and manufacturing buildings, ports, and shipyards. “You could just show up at a demolition site with a semi-truck and say, ‘Hey, let me take that off your hands.’ Pretty soon it was clear that the wood had an added value, and prices started going up.” Contractors began changing the demolition methods, carefully removing certain pieces by hand.

According to the most recent annual estimate, 30 million tons of wood waste from construction and demolition in the U.S. end up in landfills. What began as opportunistic salvage for prized timber is evolving into more coordinated systems, as cities and businesses embrace the use of reclaimed materials. Ordinances in cities like Portland, Oregon, and San Antonio require older buildings to be taken apart for repurposing the pieces, while Palo Alto, California has banned demolition completely. In Basel, Switzerland, online databases facilitate the reuse of reclaimed wood and other materials by linking potential buyers and sellers.

Using reclaimed wood in local buildings stores carbon and also helps reduce emissions by avoiding the need to cut new trees, process materials, or ship them long distances. Yet experts point to practical barriers: Many demolition contractors aren’t trained in deconstruction, and those who are often face high costs, complex logistics, or a lack of clear standards for grading and certifying salvaged wood. In most regions, markets for resale are still small, making it harder to match reclaimed supply with construction demand. 

Among the pioneers of reclaimed materials is Dave Bennink, a deconstruction expert whose teams at Re-Use Consulting have helped relocate, dismantle, or partially deconstruct thousands of structures and trained hundreds of contractors and salvage teams. Bennink estimates that these combined efforts have avoided the harvest of 10,000 acres of secondary forest — equivalent to roughly 150 million board feet of wood. 

Bennink’s work has intersected with many local initiatives — including in Portland, the first U.S. city to require old residential homes to be deconstructed rather than demolished. When the city passed its ordinance in 2016, he helped train contractors on how to dismantle buildings piece by piece. Now he’s one of a handful of experts listed in a national registry of deconstruction trainers and a member of a growing network of practitioners working to scale these methods.

Concerns about the mess and hazards of demolition in a rapidly redeveloping city spurred Portland’s mandate. Residents feared exposure to lead paint and asbestos from old buildings as demolitions spread dust throughout neighborhoods. Local interest groups petitioned city officials for deconstruction as a safer alternative. Almost a decade later, contractors have deconstructed more than 650 homes in Portland. Since implementation of a tracking system in 2018, this effort has salvaged 2,000 tons of reusable wood. 

Lauren Zimmermann Onstad, the city’s sustainable building and deconstruction specialist, credits the program’s success to early investments in training local contractors and the rise of specialized businesses that resell reclaimed materials. Lovett Deconstruction is largely focused on supplying lumber by the foot, salvaged flooring and siding, and historic pieces. Good Wood caters to designers and architects by re-milling the reclaimed wood to restore surfaces for cabinetry, siding, and other applications. “Each of the salvage shops has its own niche,” Onstad notes. “We never touch the materials, and we don’t have a central sorting lot. The businesses do that.”

Losing a building overnight — especially one tied to the community’s cultural heritage or identity — can also cause public outcry. Stephanie Phillips, the senior deconstruction and circular economy program manager at San Antonio’s office of historic preservation, says: “Deconstruction helps ease the loss of an older building because the materials live on.” San Antonio’s ordinance for deconstruction of older homes, which passed in 2022, means that if a building comes down, its parts and pieces can go toward repairing homes of a similar era or even new buildings and carry the city’s heritage with them.

Boulder, Colorado, and Palo Alto have implemented ordinances that also require deconstruction instead of demolition — and not just for old homes but any residential and commercial buildings. These policies mandate that buildings slated for removal must be carefully dismantled, with materials salvaged for reuse or recycling rather than sent to a landfill. A new ordinance for Aspen, Colorado, targets waste by requiring recovery of materials, including wood, for all permitted projects in areas greater than 2,000 square feet. 

Not every effort has succeeded, though — Milwaukee’s short-lived deconstruction ordinance that was adopted in 2018 has since been suspended, in part because the local market for salvaged materials is not established enough to support it. In Denver, voters approved the “Waste No More” initiative in 2022, but the ordinance has yet to be fully implemented. “There’s a gap between how it was written and what is actually implementable,” says Jonathan Wachtel, deputy executive director of Denver’s Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency office. One major concern: whether enough companies exist to handle the work. The city needs a sufficient network of companies that can salvage and deconstruct, as well as a strong market for reclaimed wood and other materials.

In Hennepin County, Minnesota, officials recognized early on that establishing a robust, reuse market was a critical step before cities could enact policies. In 2020, it launched a grant program to help offset the costs of deconstruction and incentivize the use of salvaged materials. Residential and commercial property owners undertaking a demolition or renovation of at least 500 square feet can receive $2 per square foot to support deconstruction and materials reuse. Olivia Cashman, the county’s construction and demolition waste specialist, says the reuse grants have helped generate more interest in reuse from residents and staff at the city level. 

One key to unlocking more demand lies in streamlining regulatory processes. While building codes don’t prohibit the use of reclaimed wood, they typically require it be reassessed to determine its suitability for future use — a process that adds cost and complexity. For example, a structural beam that supported heavy loads may no longer be viable for that use. Under current codes, including the International Residential Code, which establishes requirements for one- and two-family dwellings and townhouses, local officials can approve the use of reclaimed lumber if its strength and other key properties can be demonstrated. However, the lack of standardized, affordable methods for evaluation has made the process inconsistent and burdensome, according to many architects and builders using reclaimed materials. Several efforts are underway to develop practical solutions — including visual grading, where professionals inspect the wood and consider any changes since its initial use. The goal is to simplify approvals without compromising safety.

Building demand also requires offering products that people want. Andrew Ellsworth, founder and CEO of Doors Unhinged, a company that specializes in reclaimed commercial doors, says focusing too much on deconstruction policies can push supply into the market and drive its value down. He sees wood as an ingredient. “The problem is that people are trying to sell wood and the market wants products,” Ellsworth told me. Doors Unhinged sells ready-to-install kits, and although Ellsworth receives inquiries from potential clients across the country, he doesn’t want to rely heavily on shipping, and the carbon emissions that entails. Scaling, he said, should come from many companies offering similar services to capture, sell, and keep materials in local circulation. 

Reusing materials also requires sorting. In Kamikatsu, Japan, a small town known for its ambitious zero-waste goals, a facility provides the central space for organizing and recirculating materials. Initiatives for waste innovation centers — spaces to design and foster material recovery, processing, and reuse — are underway in Seattle and New York City. But finding physical space in densely populated cities can be a hurdle. In Basel, Switzerland, and other European cities, digital databases track reusable materials and products and connect them with buyers — even before demolition begins. 

Research suggests that deconstruction can be economically viable — especially when there’s a welcoming market for reclaimed materials. Felix Heisel, director of the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell University, recently led a study to assess the potential for deconstruction as an alternative to demolition, using a 4,500-square-foot home in Ithaca, New York. His team dismantled the structure in five days. Although labor costs were higher than for demolition, the revenue from salvaged materials nearly offset the difference. The findings suggest that, under the right conditions, deconstruction can be both time- and cost-competitive. New technologies could make salvage efforts more efficient. Companies like Urban Machine are developing robotic systems capable of taking nails out of lumber, reducing the manual labor needed.

Going forward, some architects say, buildings should be designed for disassembly — meaning every structure is built not only to last but also for easy dismantling and repurposing when its time is up. Barbara Buser, an architect and advocate for circular construction in Switzerland, argues that the crux of the problem lies in the past century of unsustainable building practices—cheap, fast construction with new materials that ignore long-term environmental costs. The real challenge, she says, is changing the way people think about buildings — not as disposable, but as sources of material. “We could systematically scan all the structures likely to be demolished and inventory their parts. That won’t help without more people wanting to reuse the materials.”