Using reclaimed wood in buildings stores carbon and helps reduce emissions by avoiding the need to cut new trees.
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.
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.
City officials credit the success of Portland’s wood reuse program to investments in training contractors in deconstruction techniques.
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.
