ECO BROOKLYN INC. » Salvaged

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.

Green From The Ground Up – Book

Gennaro Brooks-Church — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:38:46 +0000

The book Green from the Ground Up, Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Home Construction, offers everything its title promises, and yet that very same title shows how wrong the authors are. It is 330 pages full of intelligent “green” building techniques covering everything from efficient insulation techniques to natural ventilation.

The book is a fantastic overview of pretty much every good green technique being practiced by green builders, in New York and elsewhere in North America.

And yet as I read the book, getting closer and closer to the end I realized how far their definition of green is to mine. It was discouraging.

Completely missing from the entire book was any mention of salvaging materials. The word salvage doesn’t even appear in all 330 glossy pages.

Once in a short picture caption they mention the reuse of wood as a kitchen counter. And another picture caption mentions reused flooring. But both times it was all about aesthetics and not ecology.

How can you write an all inclusive green building book without once mentioning salvage? The authors don’t think salvage is part of green building. The authors are wrong. Salvage is the most green building technique there is.

It does not matter how many green counters you buy, you are still stuck in the old paradigm of material depletion, consumption and waste.

Until salvage becomes the CENTER of green building we will continue to destroy this planet.

Do the authors, who are clearly knowledgeable and experts in many green techniques, really believe that if the whole world all of a sudden started building by their techniques we would be ok?

The answer is a loud NO. We would still consume too many resources and create too much waste.

New green products have their place. For example new energy efficient fridges save massive amounts of energy compared to older ones. And waste also has its place. There are some things that deserve to be thrown away, like synthetic linoleum flooring.

But they are the exception to the main green building tenet: that cradle to cradle thinking is key to our success in returning to earth what we have taken.

Nature is a cycle and nothing is ever wasted. The rain forest does not have toxic garbage dumps. One animal’s waste is another’s food.

And likewise, one builder’s waste can be another builder’s materials. I know this. Eco Brooklyn buys very little materials and yet we do beautiful gut renovations of brownstones because there is so much good material that gets thrown out.

Ever since the start of the industrial revolution society has been on the fast track to collecting natural resources and producing things. Our world is full of stuff and increasingly short on natural resources.

Lets slow it down a little. Lets stop being so damn productive so we can consume more. We have many years before we need to make more stuff. Lets sit back and enjoy the stuff we have. Lets spend more time organizing and maintaining our stuff and less time trying to get newer versions of it. Lets be more Wabi Sabi.

As a green builder our problem is not a lack of stuff. We have access to lots of good salvaged materials. Our job sites are bursting at the seems with excellent quality salvaged materials. New York City is the Gotham Forest. NY has enough old growth wood in the bowels of its buildings to rebuild for years and never have to cut down a new tree.

Our problem as a green building company interested in ecology is to get other builders to waste less. Almost daily I meet with other builders to see if they would be willing to throw less materials in the dumpster. But habits are hard to break. Money is not stopping them since they would save money. If they throw less away they spend less on dumpster fees. Ethics is not stopping them since they want to be greener. Simple bad habits are the only thing stopping them from being greener.

The book Green from the Ground Up is a good in depth primer on isolated green building techniques. It is like the follow up to the book Green Building for Idiots. A quick reference guide if you want to know the definition of a ground source heat pump for example. For many people it will be an enlightening book.

But Green from the Ground Up lacks the holistic universal view that will really save this planet. And that starts with salvage.