Big Think

tim hall on October 3, 2009, 10:56 PM

Hi Vicki, how you been?

I’m going to be your worst critic on this one. I worked in home construction for 25 years. Dan’s show home would not pass any building inspector or board of health that I have ever had to please. This looks more like a novelty dream house to me. There is no way to economically heat or cool this home. There are health and safe-T rules that we have to follow today. They would laugh Dan out of any permit office that I know of and I have worked in five counties. I could build little shacks like Dan’s with $30,000 standard new lumber packages. This is the wrong way to go with recycled material.

Besides the cost is in education. Our education, especially in Texas, is based on real-estate. A postage stamp lot with good schools is no less than $60,000. Without a good education the cycle just keeps recycling poor ignorant unhealthy families.

Sure, if you wanted to live like the Inca on a reservation with their own building codes, live off the land, fight disease with snake oil, it would work out. But I don’t think that would be fair for the children. Dan’s home would look modern in fascist rural India.

I think we would get a lot more use out of the waste material if it were to be recycled by industry. This would take on the form of multible mandates that we will see come out of the Obama admin. as soon as the economy takes off. The pay scale for general labor is just short of slave labor in this country that pays their CEOs 70 million dollar annual wage packages plus an additional 75 million in stock options. At some point we need to stop slave labor, not offer them sweat equity unsafe housing. But yes, I am proud of Dan’s efforts for helping a very small few slaves and making however small dent in saving the earth. At least he is motivated.

Vicki Nikolaidis on October 5, 2009, 4:35 PM

Hi Tim, the www.PhoenixCommotion.com talks about meeting buidling inspections. (no, not with clubs,although my uncle was terribly beaten up one time when he worked as a building inspector in the Midwest!)

I lived in east Texas, in Huntsville! for awhile.  Not sure they are as strict about building codes as one would wish.  I once checked out a brand new 4 million dollar ‘mansion’ that was very flimsily built. Quite a shock for me. But in Texas if there is a rule or regulation I guess real Texans do the opposite!

I love the aesthetic value of the houses in the video.

I’m not sure if I’m big on industry doing the recycling.  There’s a big mess with recycling computers which i’ll try to blog about in the next couple of days.  Also most industry has always refused to this point, anyway, to use the technology available to reduce pollution in their processes. 

We’ll see!

Talk to ya later, my friend! Vicki

tim hall on October 6, 2009, 8:30 PM

Hi Vicki, I hear ya on the industrial recycling. There was a video on the truth about recycling toner cartridges. Companies send these cartridges in to be recycled and they end up along side a rural dirt road in China with 8 year old slave labor draining the last drops of blood out of them to be resold. The video showed these kids working on huge piles of cartridges with toner and ink all over them. Really sad. These products have so much toxic metals in them when handled at that level.

Governing can be quite expensive. Every time someone creates a great idea, there are always criminals pulling get rich quick schemes. If government tries to audit and pay auditors well enough not to take bribes, they go broke. We need more squealers. People should receive metals of honer for squealing. We need to start a squealer fund. There are plenty of great companies that take pride in operating environmentally sound business.

In the construction industry, the waste is just poor management. We order material by always adding 10% waste. With today’s technology, we could design and build at zero waste. Sub-contractors are lazy in the brain and too lazy to teach. Yet, they get paid double the teachers salary for throwing up a mediocre product. They are pigs. Dumping fees need to double their environmental tax. Force the pigs to do their job.

Vicki Nikolaidis on October 9, 2009, 6:29 AM

Joe BrockhausWe have a resource like this here in Cincy — It’s called Building Value:http://bit.ly/UIT73This year was the region’s first completely de-constructed house:http://bit.ly/3PTOfe

tim hall on October 10, 2009, 10:15 PM

I always thought it would come to this someday but could never figure out how it might work. They do not show a final cost to the city or the non profit on this new project. I always say show me your books or I will show you the door if you call yourself a nonprofit.

I have used reclaimed lumber on small projects before. It does not go up as fast. The aged wood has become so hard that the nails just bend before they sink. This means one is better off using a screw gun. You could raise the pressure on an air nailer, but then your asking for accidents by blowing out the side of the crisp lumber. The carpenter would have to charge quiet a bit more to use this lumber. The same problem with extracting the old nails. They just break off. One would be better off cutting or grinding them off. This requires more power tools and power. Then we have the lead paint issue and other hazardous chemicals. If not done properly, you would be risking human lives to cancer to save 400 new growth trees. When you re-use non-engineered lumber you need to go back to plaster and lath in order to achieve straight walls. Plaster is an old trade that has become expensive and time consuming. This project may only be applicable in yuppievilles where folks have the money and the will to properly dispose of an eye-sore. If they can overcome a lot of these obstacles without running slave camps, I am all for it. Raise my taxes, I don’t mind. I will take social capitalism over fascist capitalism any day.

There are thousands of huge houses setting empty in the slums of southwest Cincy. A lot of great recoverable hardwoods. It is so violent of an area that the city put up permanent rotating spotlights and blocked off all alley ways. There isn’t a night time there. The idea is to lower the property value to nothing, then condemn the whole area. The large brokers are then allowed exclusive rights through the city only selling in bundles. Then they rebuild the hood into yuppieville. If you get in early on one of these deals, before the value goes sky high, you can find two houses next to one another and salvage one to rebuild the other.

We did a project in Indy where we connected the two medium sized homes into a single large home. The connected area became the great room and I talked the owner into leaving the upstairs windows, flower boxes and all. So your setting in the great room looking up at second story windows that are now on the inside wall. We took the old round copper rain troughs and had them dipped, then used them for lighting fiixtures tuning them in different directions and applications.. We ran about $100,000 over budget but the owner was very pleased with the finished product. It was not meant to be a recycle job although we used alot of what was there for visual effect.

I worked on an 80% recovered materials project last spring. It was a 1923 sorority house accross from Butler U. I was in charge of cleaning and restoring the granite. We took the granite stone from the dilapidated porches and reused it in a more modern approach. They removed all the old concrete walks and sent them to a plant that ground them to use for our new concrete blocks for our granite porch columns. They are called green block and they were more expensive. But the state was working with the investor to some degree on the 80% recovered material project. I don’t know how the investor finally came out on the deal. He was a really great guy and showed up almost every day to make sure there wasn’t any waste. It was a beautiful re-mat. project.

I am far from negative on re-mat. ideas. I am a firm believer in spending tax payers money to experiment. I just have the desire to make sure we are keeping it real. We have plenty of professional trades persons like myself that can tell you if it will work or not and what the real costs are. When ideas are forced beyond professional knowledge, we end up with break-downs of the product , unequal labor production, or failed hidden breakdowns covered up by management and politicians motivated in seeking re-election.

But I know nothing. I am just a 30 year veteran professional mason overlapping a 15 year  upscale general contractor and remodeler retiring to a 7 year apprentice graphic designer. In graphic design we were tested on enviromental printing products. We had to know all methods of foresting, production processes of paper and cardboard products, processes of recycled paper, appropriate apps. of recycled product, convincing statagy to promote recycled paper product and I hope I can remember it all. Within our industry, almost every one promotes on every project to use recycled paper products, from the project salseman, to the client, designer, paper distributor to the printer. We take pride in doing everything that we can because we dam well know that we are one of the major sources of the problem. We have all done our planet homework in the print industry. We are all fully aware that if we do not continue to innovate in leaps and bounds the whole paper industry is finished. Please be responsible with our paper products, our jobs count on you. Be responsible by looking for our recycled product icon on your next purchases. It really does matter. We bring you visual experiances that life would be really drab if we end up having to do away with them.