Help us reach our goal of $25,000 to support boots on the ground to keep building materials out of the ground!
Greeting reuse fans,
600 million tons of construction and demolition (C&D) waste are generated each year. 70% of the C&D waste stream is concrete and asphalt, which mostly gets down-cycled into lower quality aggregate material. The remainder of the C&D waste stream, including wood, glass, doors, windows, fixtures etc., goes into the ground, buried in landfills.
At CJ, our mission to support conservation through the reuse of building materials relies on keeping these materials out of the ground. We serve in many ways as a last chance, the final exit ramp for materials before the dump, by providing convenient drop off service at our warehouse in Pittsburgh’s East End as well as free pick up of building materials by our donations & logistics department. Over the last 22 years, we have worked to provide education and outreach, seeking to partner with trades, architects, developers and contractors to respond to and prevent waste in the construction industry. We’ve also pushed for stronger government policy and sought grant funding to expand our impact.
But what happens when the call comes for big jobs like barns, schools, or the sprawling United Mine Workers training facility in Washington, PA that we deconstructed in 2020? Your financial contribution will help us put more boots on the ground to support our most compelling (and costly) method to keep materials out of the ground and that’s deconstruction.
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CJ’s deconstruction department (or “decon” as we call the team) has evolved and grown over the the course of nearly two decades, functioning during the majority of the time as 3 full time staff members who spend their days going into buildings before demolition or rehabilitation and removing doors, trim, flooring, stair parts, cabinets—pretty much anything that can be reused—and salvaging those items so that they can be made available in our retail inventory. This work often brings in unique and hard to find architectural details as well as many quality materials in large volume! In the past, when we needed more boots on the ground in order to handle the size of a project or to juggle multiple locations within tight windows of time, we’ve had to get creative in order to save these materials. Pulling employees from other areas of staff and flexing out our manpower resources, our decon crew has at times utilized everyone from seasonal hires to part-time retail employees, all the way up to our executive director, who have picked up a prybar, learned to use a reciprocating saw, or helped ferry loads of materials back to CJ in a rental truck.
Instead of continuing to pull staff away from their primary duties, we have sought outside resources to “ramp up” our decon crew when the situation required. Extra boots now had to come from various labor resources, job training and workforce development partners. Finding the right partnerships to accommodate these unpredictable and urgent “emergency” labor needs, often changing on a day to day basis and even at the drop of an e-mail, has been challenging. But with experience, CJ has learned how to make a successful and cohesive process to manage a constantly fluctuating workload. With grant support, we have developed our most successful relationship with the South Hilltop Men’s Group, a Beltzhoover-based nonprofit organization that provides training and paid job opportunities for men in this community with barriers to employment.
Several of CJ’s largest and most impactful deconstruction jobs could not have been completed without the dedicated men in this program, including the aforementioned UMWA training mine, the Michael Baker house in Butler, PA, and the full structure deconstruction of a maintenance building at the Pittsburgh Botanic Gardens. Since 2019, we have provided paid training and work experience for 63 “Hilltop” trainees for a total of 5,345 hours.
2022 is poised to be the year that Construction Junction begins a partnership with the City of Pittsburgh to pilot deconstruction of 20 to 30 condemned properties. With your support, the impact of deconstruction and reuse will not only save a wider variety of items and make them available for sale to meet the various needs of people in the community, but increase development of innovative policies to reduce blight while limiting lead particulate pollution, create jobs, provide a sustainable alternative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions created by new manufacturing and continue to help to build a more circular economy.
Click here for a Paypal link to make a contribution >>
Reaching our goal of a $25,000 Deconstruction Readiness Fund will help us to be prepared for more opportunities; not just the labor, but tools, equipment, rentals, transportation, and administrative support so that when it comes down to crunch time, we can put enough boots on the ground to keep even more building materials out of the ground!
