It’s a brave new material world
by Marci Jacobs
March 12, 2013
Courtesy of the Rebuilding Exchange
Product designer Casey Burkitt teaches workshop students how to build a mirror out of repurposed materials.
The college is home to a menagerie of three-dimensional models of prehistoric proportions.
From a distance, they have every quality of fine sculpture and design. But inch your way in and you will see they are constructed of the most humble of resources: the hammerhead is made of recycled plastic paneling, the lion an assemblage of repurposed Nike shoe boxes and the Jabberwocky a pastiche of magazine scraps. The pigment-perfect replica of former Mayor Richard M. Daley is a vast, digitized grid of crude, plastic-capped pushpins.
And people other than artists are catching on to the brave new world of waste-reduction.
As society awakens to the dire realities of climate change and resource depletion, a junkyard renaissance of sorts is blooming, fertilized by abandoned objects and reusable industrial materials. A number of Chicago-area businesses are looking at unorthodox and castaway materials as the building blocks of a more sustainable future.
Local architects are among the chief pioneers.
“The trend runs from straightforward reuse in construction to basically taking constructed things and reusing them in novel ways,” said Andrew Wolfram, global leader of preservation and reuse at architecture firm Perkins+Will, a partner in the adaptation of Chicago’s Fulton Market Cold Storage into an office complex.
Architects and builders are, quite literally, digging deep to satisfy increasing client demands for repurposed materials.
“In the past they’d knock a building down and just bury it,” Wolfram said, explaining that a treasure trove of discarded artifacts lies just below the earth’s surface, in many cases possessing greater value than their freshly manufactured equivalents.
For example, much of the wood interred in the earth’s crust is at least 80 years old and of significantly higher quality than the modern tree-farm type. “You just can’t find that quality of wood anymore,” Wolfram said.
Builders are similarly scavenging today’s teardowns for reusable pieces such as doors, cabinets, beams and flooring. Their motivations tend to be both environmental and aesthetic – and not necessarily economic.
“Most of the stuff I’m seeing is just the same price and that’s because people are wanting it, it’s in limited supply and it’s becoming trendy,” said Sean Moran, owner of NewGrange Development, a construction company focused on sustainable design. “It’s just as high quality as buying it new, but it has a vintage look to it. So there’s value in those old building materials that would otherwise be thrown out.”
But a discount market for salvaged materials also exists. The Rebuilding Exchange, a Chicago-area non-profit that warehouses building remnants intercepted before hitting the landfill, sees substantial traffic from contractors in the market for marked-down, second-hand wood slabs.
“People are starting to realize that there are advantages all around for reclaiming material,” said Rebuilding Exchange manager Heather White. “We have a lot of contractors come in and restaurants right now looking for things. If you look at some of the things in our warehouse, if you went somewhere else to buy it, some other big place to buy, say, a door, we’d be half that price.”
The exchange accepts everything from salvaged bowling lanes to barn siding. What it doesn’t sell it uses in its workshop series, which include woodworking, metalworking and do-it-yourself home improvement. For Valentine’s Day the exchange hosted a “Couples Wood & Wine Coat Rack Make It/Take It” class.
“People just don’t know how to repurpose it,” White said about the raw materials collected at the warehouse. “So we try to help them think of creative ways to use it.”
And repurposing has practical advantages beyond construction and design. Take the livestock backscratcher manufactured by Repurchased Materials, a Denver-based company that sells farm and ranch products made of reclaimed materials throughout the country that has a substantial number of contracts in the Chicago area. The back-scratching tool is made from discarded street sweeper brushes and sells for $125. It has been such a sensation nationwide that the Bronx Zoo recently bought two for its rhinoceros pit.
“We were just at a farm show and it had a back scratcher with an electric motor on it and it was $2,800,” said owner Damon Carson.
While a large degree of repurposing occurs in the high-end home construction industry, a growing market also exists for economical repurposed materials, Carson explains.
“Our largest customer base is farmers and ranchers,” he explained. “And we say this a lot: ‘Does repurposing make more sense environmentally or economically?’ And the truth is it’s both.”
Carson states his company’s mission simply as “creative re-use,” and argues that repurposing “is not recycling that has gotten all the buzz since the 1970s. We deal with byproducts and waste that get a second life because they have value ‘as is.’”
What salvaged materials also have is a past.
“When we tell people that it’s made from recycled products and where it comes from, it’s like ‘Oh, wow, that’s interesting,’” said Clare Leavitt, store manager at Chicago-based Ten Thousand Villages, which partners with artisans in developing countries to support sustainable economic development. “It’s fun looking at the customer’s face when we say this is made out of this.”
Ten Thousand Villages’ products derive from a universe of reclaimed materials, from furniture made of lava-soaked wood to sculptures made from Colombian orange peels to jewelry made from land mines.
“From the wars in Cambodia, there’s non-exploding bombs and bomb casings from explosions,” Leavitt said. “A group called HALO Trust goes through and demines the fields, and then our artisan group purchases the casings and makes these necklaces.”
The necklace is called “the tree of life,” and certainly is a new way of looking at a killing device.
Art gallery owner Carl Hammer explains that while the impulse to repurpose unconventional materials runs deep in our artistic history, there is greater concern for reclaiming things nowadays.
“I think it makes the artwork a lot more thoughtful in that respect,” Hammer said. “The artwork has had another life. It becomes like a monument to the material itself.”
Warehouse staff members at the Rebuilding Exchange likely agree--many of them were hired by the exchange after serving prison sentences.
In training to work with salvaged goods, “As I was told, nothing should be thrown away, because it always could be reused,” said Stanley Branch, a warehouse associate at the exchange whose skills might have gone wasted if he, too, were not given the opportunity to reinvent himself.
