Eco Brooklyn » Salvaged

New York Contractor Builds Passive House out of Salvaged Materials

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 03:06:24 +0000

Here is a short video we threw together of the Passive House renovation in Harlem. The video mostly discusses the budgeting of the project.

Now that the construction is for the most part done I think that our initial budget of $175/sq.ft is not sustainable. Of course it is great for the client in the long run. But as a company that practices the triple bottom line - people, planet, profit - our budget did not satisfy all three items.

Out of the three I can say without a doubt the planet was benefited by this job. We built a Passive House. We salvaged almost everything to build the house, creating a negative impact on the dump, meaning the house removed more garbage from the dump than it created.

Unfortunately the other two items – people and profit – did not get a fair deal. The workers were not paid enough, the client is not happy and the company did not make enough of a profit. Workers and company need to be taken care of in order for us to continue to make a meaningful impact on the world. Happy clients means more opportunities to build green.

The clients came to us with a very tight budget, $800,000, which is not enough for the scope of the complete gut rehab Passive House. $1,200,000 would have been more realistic.

But being realistic in not what got Eco Brooklyn to where it is now. You don’t start a cutting edge green building company because you are realistic. You start it because you are deeply idealistic and willing to sacrifice everything in the hope that it will make a difference to the world. There are huge risks to this.

So in that spirit we took on the job, our main goal to find a way to build a cutting edge green home on an affordable budget. We accomplished this, so from that point of view it was a great success.

But the clients are not happy and the company was hit hard financially. It may seem odd that the clients are not happy given they gained a $1 million plus house for $800K. We literally saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars all the while helping the environment.

But to achieve that we all had to make sacrifices. The main sacrifice was that as a company we could not afford to hire enough management. The job process was rocky. A green company needs to be even better organized than other companies because we are dealing with new cutting edge technologies with steep learning curves and we salvage materials thus we can’t tightly control the delivery time of materials.

This lack of management meant details were missed and client/contractor interaction was not as common. So even though behind the scenes we felt we were performing miracles to save the client money and add value to their home, the client did not see this.

The client simply felt they were paying what to them felt like a lot of money and we were not delivering as smoothly as they wanted. Because they don’t have a good grasp of what things cost it did not matter how many times we told them they would never be able to get this value elsewhere on their budget.

And when they did look elsewhere for comparison they saw crappy building with nice fixtures – the so called luxury condo that looks like a million dollars for the first couple years and costs a fortune to run. When you compare that to our building that does not look as fancy they felt shortchanged.

Never mind ours costs nothing to run and is built to last a hundred years. Those things are not as sexy as sparkling appliances and brand new moldings.

So we felt we were loosing our battle with the clients. It was very frustrating because we believe deeply that the building we made is decades ahead of any building built in the city today.

Core Values

In hindsight the main conflict was between the company’s and the client’s core values.

The company’s core value is clearly to put the benefit of the planet before anything else, with the understanding that by doing this we are benefiting ourselves as well. And in this case we did it to a fault (we should have done less for the planet and more for ourselves in order to continue strong in the long run).

But going balls out for the environment is both our strength and weakness.

The clients core value was to put their own benefit before anything else. This is not to say they did not care about Eco Brooklyn or the environment. But like most people, at the top of list is their own financial security, their family and their home, and when possible, but only when possible they consider the rest of the world.

I get that. I am a family man.

But I am also a green builder and sometimes things get complicated.

The problem was that we feel looking out for the environment is the best thing we can do for the client in the long run, even if it means less of a perfect construction process in the short run. The client however just wants a home for their family. Getting that done is challenge enough, never mind some idealistic and abstract global thinking.

Because of this we found ourselves at odds. For us if we could help the environment more we would. Even at the expense of short term discomforts and stress imposed by our main mistake – not budgeting for enough management and budgeting too much for the green building items – which arose from our over ambitious attempt to build a home for hundreds of thousands less than normally it would cost.

The client however found this inexcusable. If it is a choice to go some time without water in order to get gray water plumbing installed or skip the gray water and have water for their kids to take a bath they pick the later.

Unfortunately we were doing the building and not them. And we are very hard headed.

We picked to do the gray water, which delayed the job and meant the clients went without water for longer. Inexcusable in their eyes. Simply bad management. In our eyes it was a small sacrifice for something that will benefit the planet for many years to come…..which in turn benefits them.

It wasn’t like we expected the client to sacrifice alone. Eco Brooklyn always sacrificed first. If we found a way to satisfy the client and the environment at the cost of our profit then we made sure we did that first. Our priorities were planet, client then us.

Maybe we are wrong. Maybe that priority serves nobody. But I have this idea that we are connected and the ecology is in a lot worse shape than we are. Since we are ecology that needs to be dealt with first……?

But when the client is spending their hard earned money and the feel like the second fiddle, good will goes out the window fast and they stopped caring for us.

Towards the end of the job when we realized our ecological zeal had put our finances in tight stretches we got no mercy from the clients. In their memory was the lack of water and they made sure to withhold money accordingly. Water is just an example our of many conflicts of core values that arose.

What have I learned from this?

I can’t expect others to sacrifice for my cause. Next time I will only take on clients who can afford $1,200,000 and be done with it. They will get the job they were promised and I will be able to build houses that harm the environment a lot less.

This means that many people will be priced out and not benefit from Eco Brooklyn’s amazing green building.

But I have learned the hard way that when things get tight people hunker down and look out for themselves. It is about survival and humans can be the most brutal creatures on earth when they feel their own is being threatened.

I can’t put myself in that position of dealing with clients like that. Nor can I put the clients in that position. The clients of this house are scared. They feel we managed the job recklessly and this puts them at risk.

When they came to us they entrusted us as professionals to guide them in the building of a green home. They had no idea how much emphasis we put on green and at some point they wondered if we even cared about their home.

So in the future we won’t try the affordable green building thing because we can’t trust the client will be as willing as we are to build green. Instead we will charge. That way it won’t be a choice between having water on time or having a gray water system. We will have a budget to do both on time.

The clients of our current house had a tough time of it. I think with time they will forget the discomforts of the building process. As that fades they will see the value of the house. They might even be grateful towards us. But I doubt it.

Would I do it again? Yes. I think the struggle was worth the gain. It is an amazing house.

It is the first time in the history of building that a Passive House was built with such a high percentage of salvaged materials. It is revolutionary. And we did it not on some plot of land in Oregon but in one of the most expensive places to build on earth. For the price of a crap “luxury condo”!

But like all revolutions it was painful. And I am hurting more than anyone. I made sure I put my money where my mouth was. The clients probably will never understand that. But that is ok. I care about the house that we brought into existence.

When we are all dead that house will still be a wonderful home for families. That is a great gift. It is the least I can do for the planet and my fellow humans.

Here is the video that prompted this post.

Material Reuse with the NYCMEDP

Yi Deng — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:10:02 +0000

Eco Brooklyn has partnered up with the NYC Materials Exchange Development Program, a great non-profit that keeps reusable materials out of the trash by connecting people with unwanted materials to others who can reuse them.

The NYCMEDP runs a number of ongoing service, outreach, and research programs. The NYC Waste Match, for example, is a free service that can help green builders salvage materials efficiently by connecting us directly with businesses and individuals doing demolition and construction. Waste Match also helps these people save money on disposal costs while building an environmentally friendly image. Salvage is a win-win situation, and we hope that more people will choose to reuse materials now that the NYCMEDP is providing an easy way to do it.

Check out our member page on their site!

Salvaging Materials at EcoBrooklyn

Stavros Ladeas — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:37:33 +0000

Gennaro Brooks-Church, Director of EcoBrooklyn Inc, discusses the significant element of salvaging materials for use in the company’s green renovations. Currently we are wrapping up a full-renovation of a brownstone in Manhattan where we’ve been working hard to attain its stringent Passive House requirements.

Check out our video below, and feel free to leave us some feedback!

Bringing Passivhaus to Harlem

Dan Hunter — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:41:41 +0000

Check out this great article about our Eco Brooklyn’s Passive House in Harlem. GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, a great online source for building, designing, and remolding green homes, sent Richard Defendorf to our Harlem site to check out our work. Read his write-up of all the techniques we used to seal our passive house!

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/green-building-news/bringing-passivhaus-harlem

Zero Brownstone Technique and Salvaged Materials

Stavros Ladeas — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:01:19 +0000

EcoBrooklyn Director Gennaro Brooks-Church, talks about the importance of salvaged materials which are crucial in helping achieve the company’s goal of zero or negative waste created and zero or negative new materials used. This is one of the main things that separates Eco Brooklyn from an ordinary NY contractor – finding floor joists, wood flooring, insulation, sheetrock and many variations of plywood, just to name a few of the many salvaged products used. The triple bottom line (people, profit and planet) is kept in mind as the spectrum of values in measuring the company’s success.

Here is a video explaining some of what goes into this sometimes laborious but very important job.

Salvaged Crystal Stone

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:30:43 +0000

Eco Brooklyn’s business model is to salvage as much as possible. We believe this is the true definition of a NY green contractor in a city with such abundant and high quality trash. We recently salvaged what we thought was marble. We cut it down to make all the bathroom and kitchen counters for the Brooklyn Green Show House.

But it turns out it is not marble but Crystal Stone, a human made product from waste glass, marble and other rocks. For us this is a double win: salvaged material that is recycled.

We discovered that it was Crystal Stone the hard way: after breaking several masonry bits. This stuff is HARD!

We should have suspected it wasn’t marble after leaving it outside in the rain and sun for a year. It didn’t stain or fade at all.

It is good stuff. Check it out here.

Here is the stone after a year of sitting in the mud, sun and rain

We cut it to shape and sanded it down

And then sanded it some more...

And here is the salvaged Crystal Stone in the kitchen. We made matching bathroom counters too.

It Should Be a Crime!

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:13:17 +0000

A typical thing happened today in the life of Eco Brooklyn. One of our workers noticed a dumpster full of wood and called it in to the office. I dispatched our “Rescue Truck”, Eco Brooklyn’s veggie oil pickup, to go salvage the wood before it was carted off to the dump.

This wood has sat in a brownstone for over 80 years. It is beautiful douglass fir, in the form of studs or joists. Nice thick wood with another hundred years of life left to it, at least. It is beautiful wood. You can sand it down and put oil on it for a kitchen counter or island. You can cut it down and use as siding. Or cut it into planks for flooring. Or put it back into a house simply as joists or studs. It is like art. Art direct from nature.

You can’t get this wood today. It comes from old trees and has had a hundred years to cure. It is part of a long ago history when wood was as abundant and healthy as the bison.

When the driver and helper got to the dumpster the workers on the site had started putting soil on top of the wood. We asked if the contractor would stop for a few minutes to give my guys time to take out the wood. We don’t push the ecological logic in this situation. We point out the financial logic that the dumpster will cost about $800 and if we take half the wood we save the contractor maybe $400.

But the contractor refused. So my guys worked frantically to save the wood as the other workers poured soil on top of it. We got only six beams before the soil became too much to move. We watched as they covered up the other sixty beams.

Today we didn’t succeed. Some days we do but it is a constant fight.

Throwing away this wood should be a crime. The waste is so saddening. Such ignorance, such arrogance.

It is so frustrating that this is legally and morally acceptable. Thousands of dumpsters a year, millions of board feet a year thrown into the trash heap.

Sometimes I think I am surrounded by insanity. Or maybe I am insane.

One client I met with today just came back from the Amazon forest recording sounds. He has been going for ten years. He says it is getting hard to go because the forest is disappearing so fast before his eyes he can’t bear the pain. He said on the plane he overheard some forest company workers joking about how they had lied to government officials about the origin of a certain tree in order to log it. They thought it was funny.

We live in a spiraling time where we have the power to destroy or save the planet in an astoundingly short time. Never in the history of humanity have we had this power. There is a crisis in the world. Wake up. Become humble. Do good.

New York Salvaged Flooring

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 02:16:36 +0000

Here is a photo essay of how we salvaged some flooring and reused it. We bought 15,000 square feet of herring bone style mahogany flooring from an office building.

The flooring didn’t look too fancy laying in a big pile:

They had glued it down previously.

We then cut it to make length wise flooring. We stapled it down with a sound proofing layer under it. We chose staples instead of glue because it is less toxic.

Then we sanded the old toxic varnish off:

Then we applied layers of tung oil and citrus solvent:

It got richer and richer with each application of tung oil:

The sanded down staples added a nice old fashioned look to the wood:

We have lots more if you want to buy some for your home. As a New York green contractor we feel the biggest impact we can have is through salvage. It reduces our consumption, which is the largest cause of our ecological problems.

New York Eco Deck Installation

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Fri, 06 May 2011 02:12:12 +0000

We went by to check on a deck we built in Manhattan last year. It looks good! It was raining which made the deck glisten more.

We made it out of salvaged Douglass fir joists from an old building. We sanded them down and oiled them up with natural oils.

Check it out:

New York Green Roof Installation

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:42:53 +0000

We just wrapped up a green roof job in East New York. Here is a photo essay from start to finish. We planted late in the year and the nights were already freezing. But we trusted the hardiness of sedum and so far they have shown to be very happy on the new roof.

The roof was your typical lifeless petrochemical slab with about six layers of tar.

The first thing we had to do was remove the tar roof. It was at the end of its life and starting to become too heavy for the house. We then built a little one foot wall around the perimer to hold the future green roof.

We had our share of nightmare weather and leaks.

We then put five layers of salvaged polyiso for a R60 roof. The materials we use is very important. We salvage as much as possible. We also didn’t want to use the conventional method of gluing the boards, which is really toxic. Below you can see a great alternative we did where we tied the insulation down with string – a very low embodied energy low toxic solution that is strong enough against the powerful winds in that area.

We then put a layer of rubber epdm, which isn’t exactly a green product but it lasts about four times longer than tar so it is pretty amazing.

The key to a green roof is that you recreate the qualities of the ground but with much less depth and much lighter. You accentuate the drainage and water retention qualities by using drainage layers and retention layers. You keep it light by using high nutrient growing medium with a lot of light filler.

Next we put a water drainage layer. It has a mesh that makes a space for the water to drain.

We salvaged the drainage layer from Build It Green but didn’t have enough so we bought another kind from the store. This one instead of a plastic mesh it has little dimples that create space for the water to drain.

Next we put the water retention layer. We got that from our friend Atom who had some left over from her jobs. The water retention layers are like big soft blankets.

Next we laid the soil all over at 3″ depth. We used Gaia Soil. It is cool because it uses recycled Styrofoam. I have my reservations about surrounding ourselves with yet more plastic….but it is salvaging huge amounts of garbage from the dump.

Here is the staging area.

Gaia soil is so light that it easily blows away so once the soil was down we covered it with jute. Over time the jute decomposes but by then the roots are holding the soil down.

Over the jute we put an inch of organic locally made compost. This holds the jute down as well as keeps the plants healthy.

On top of all this we put mulch. The mulch holds the layers down as well as gives some protection for the plants from the harsh climate up there on the roof. It also looks very dramatic! We salvaged our mulch from a garden center that was throwing it away. A rat had made its home in the pallet of mulch and they couldn’t sell it. I saw the rat as I was carting the bags away. I apologized for taking his home. Notice the gnaw holes in the bags.

Finally we bring the plants. We got our plants from two places. The first is a garden center that was throwing plants away because they had become too ugly for customers to buy. We don’t mind ugly. We love all plants even the ugly ones. We let the plants sit over the summer in a very hot and dry environment because we had no other place to put them. Because they were not your typical green roof sedum it was a great test to see which ones can handle a hot and dry green roof. Here they are when we got them.

The other plants are your typical sedum. We buy them from a local psychiatric center whose patients grow plants as part of their therapy. An employee approached Eco Brooklyn asking if we would be willing to buy the plants. Management is trying to cut funding for the gardening program but if it makes money they agreed not to cut it. It is very warped. These poor mental patients have to prove their therapy is making a profit in order to get funding. We gladly buy the plants.

We lay the plants out on the roof and then insert the plugs into the growing medium. Around the border of the roof we put stones we salvaged from a cellar excavation. They hold the roof layers down against strong winds.

We placed some salvaged tiles as stepping stones.

And here is the finished product one day after planting.

Some of the green roof plants we installed. They are just little plugs now but will eventually cover the whole roof with a lush green cover:

Here is the green roof drain, again all salvaged materials:

As New York green roof installers with a passion for pushing green building to higher level the ingredients of a green roof are just as important to us as the end result. It is great that it is a green roof. It is also great that the soil, the mats, the plants and various other things are salvaged and recycled content, thus reversing the landfill waste and reducing consumption of new resources.

It is great that the workers were there for more than a paycheck. They loved and enjoyed the process and were proud of their accomplishment. Also great is that it is for a very modest income client. It is important to us that green building be accessible to middle income people. That is how we will make the most significant positive impact.

This is the magic of holistic building. All the parts are equally important and supportive of the whole.