There are changes coming to how we throw things away in Ulster County. The day of the wrecking ball may be over. Instead of demolition, we will focus on deconstruction, allowing bricks, boards, and other building material to be reused. Instead of smashing and tearing sheetrock, we will have careful removal to produce nice clean reusable sheets.

Marc Rider of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency is pushing for this concept to take physical shape by the fall, at the UCRRA Reuse Innovation Center, a hub for reusability. UCRRA plans for a landfill are on hold, but this facility, a passion project of Rider’s, continues apace with a goal to reduce the amount of stuff that gets thrown out.

“The big focus of this hub will be as a point of collection and processing center for reusable materials,” Rider says, “so that we can turn them around and put them back into use.”

In addition to the focus on building materials, the center will also have “a small retail side to it,” featuring everything from furniture to textiles.

Over in Ithaca, this concept is already in place at Finger Lakes ReUse and their colorful ReUse MegaCenter. Inside there’s a retail space where furniture, books, textiles, are on sale. This is all stuff that we throw away, often when it’s perfectly good and could be reused by someone else.

Marc Rider emphasizes though that the primary focus in Ulster County will be on building materials. “With deconstructing, you’re manually dismantling a building.”

Deconstruction is already rippling through the demolition industry. As much as a quarter of all the materials in a house can be readily reused if they’re taken apart with care. As much as 70% of materials can be recycled. That’s a massive reduction in the waste stream with both environmental benefits and a significant reduction in construction expense.

So, the county is pushing for houses and other buildings to be taken apart piece by piece with the goal of salvaging for reuse. That means doors, windows, fixtures, beams, and floor boards, will be pulled out and cleaned up in a process that’s been called ‘construction in reverse.’

Of course, it’s not without hiccups. One immediate issue is that it can be hard to know what exactly is in place in a house or building, or what condition the materials are in, before deconstruction. Old plans may simply not exist anymore, and, of course, few of today’s buildings were constructed with deconstruction in mind. Adhesives, for instance, can ruin materials.

One fascinating angle in this is the use of ScanR by Cornell’s Circular Construction Lab. This uses LiDAR scanning and image recognition software, cross-referenced with the architecture library to work out what’s there and how best to take it apart. LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging and is best known for use in mapping and agriculture, with some spectacular results from scanning Central American jungles for ancient monuments. Now it’s being turned towards roof joins, stair stringers, and all the other connections for lumber in a house.

Then there’s robots! One called Urban Machine uses X-ray tech and visual recognition to find and pull fasteners, including those tricky staples.

Ahead, there might be “building and materials passports” that will have documentation of what is in any new structure, including where and when it was made, which will be available for those who will deconstruct it decades down the line.

Of course, this is New York, so building codes have to be changed and new ones developed. There is a group called CRoWD (Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development) working to develop state level legislation in this area.

States are looking to Portland, Oregon for guidance. They have a law mandating careful deconstruction of any building built in 1940 or earlier, especially if it was designated a “historic structure for demolition review.”

UCRRA’s plan is to buy two parcels right by Kingston Airport, at 1151 and 1155 Flatbush Road, which will be turned into the center.

Right now, Rider is preparing to get a letter of intent for purchase of the parcels at the March meeting of the UCRRA board on March 13. Then will come a meeting with the county legislature, probably in April.

“I expect to close on the property in July,” adds Rider. “There are already good buildings on the site, very little renovation is needed. I think we can be in operation by the fall.”