Full circle

Buy green, grow green
Building-material manufacturers are responding to the increasing concern for the environment by producing more sustainable products.

Incorporating green materials into new residential and commercial buildings and renovations should begin early, preferably in the design phase. The products and resources selected play a significant role in accomplishing the overall goals for producing more sustainable spaces.

Choosing a product made with recycled content is a good place to start. Purchasing these products not only expands markets for recycled goods, but also slows the consumption of raw materials, and reduces the amount of waste entering landfills.

Wasteful nation
When you choose to recycle, do you ever wonder what those materials are transformed into? A surprisingly large amount is turned into a wide variety of recycled-content building materials, such as floor and ceiling tiles, carpet, gypsum board, concrete, masonry, acoustic tile, metals and insulation, just to name a few.

Americans throw away more plastic bottles than any other nation. More than 90 percent of the bottles we use end up in incinerators or landfills—that’s an astounding 2.5 million plastic bottles going to landfills every hour. This is a phenomenal amount of waste for an item that can be recycled into synthetic carpet and fabric. To give you some perspective, consider how 3 million recycled water bottles could make 74 million square feet of carpet.

We also waste a lot of glass, which can be reused to make floor tiles. And how about the very pages of the Chico News & Review? Newsprint can be recycled into cellulose to produce insulation, conserving between 26 percent and 38 percent more energy than traditional fiberglass insulation. For a 1,700 square-foot house, 100 years’ worth of one individual’s newspapers would do the job. Wallboard and ceiling tiles are also made using recycled newspaper.

Digest this, consumers!
Recycling conserves both raw materials and energy, and reduces the amount of waste we produce. Building products with recycled content are beneficial to the environment because they reduce virgin material use and solid-waste volumes. Typically, products made with recycled content list the quantity they contain by specifying the recycled portion as coming from either post-consumer or pre-consumer material, or a mixture of both.

Post-consumer material is defined as waste material generated by households or by commercial, industrial and institutional facilities in their role as end-users of the product, which can no longer be used for its intended purpose. This includes those very unsustainable water bottles that are ending up in landfills! Buy a reusable water bottle, already! Recycled newspaper also is a post-consumer material.

Pre-consumer material is defined as material diverted from the waste stream during the manufacturing process. Excluded is reutilization of materials such as rework, regrind or scrap that’s generated and capable of being reclaimed within the same process that generated it. An interesting pre-consumer material is fly ash, a by-product of coal burning operations that is used as a replacement for Portland cement, a virgin material, when making concrete.

Money talks
A bigger emphasis is placed on using materials with post-consumer recycled content because more of it ends up in our landfills. Here are some things to add to your sustainable to-do list:

• When shopping, choose products made from recycled and recyclable materials.

• When designing, establish a goal for integrating recycled-content materials in your project and identify suppliers who can achieve this goal.

• During construction, ensure that the supplies are installed.

Remember that consumers’ dollars speak volumes to suppliers and manufacturers. The more green products we purchase, the more they will create. That’s good scenario for all involved, especially the earth.