I was watching the damage of the last hurricane and all I saw was a massive pile of perfectly good wood that could be recycled. All those trusses could have been ripped down into 2X4’s and the 2X4’s could be ripped and glued into 4x4’s.
Is all this stuff just buried in landfills? I say this because I was watching them take a building apart a year ago and the dumpster was full of what looked like prime 2x4’s. If I could have gotten back in time with a trailer I could have easily recovered enough lumber to build a 2 car garage.
As a slight aside, I had a job in college where all we did was prefab houses, and then put them up about 45 feet from a 500lb ANFO car bomb. After the shot, there was always a -lot- of good lumber left, since most of the wall sections collapsed into just two or three main piece. We had to run over the perfectly good pieces of 2x4s with a track loader to bust them before we could load them into the dumpsters. People were coming back into work after hours and taking the good pieces, often times setting aside the good pieces on the clock. It was partially because of that, and partially due to liability concerns that we had to ruin a lot of good wood.
My WAG is that the hand labor necessary to recycle stuff in the aftermath of a hurricane makes it impractical, given that the goal is to get the stuff out of the streets ASAP, and labor requirements would be enormous.
OTOH, it seems to me that it might be a good idea to create massive collection sites in the countryside to sort the stuff over a period of months or years and provide jobs for people who might have lost theirs because of the storms. Given economies of scale, it could even be profitable.
I worked a construction laborer job one summer, and I had to clean piles of wood scrap from home sites. Depending on what town I was in, I either openly burnt them in piles or threw them in a dumpster. I hated doing that, it seemed like such a waste (though there was no “good” wood pieces among the scrap).
Many of these piles are going to be knotted up, gnarled masses of things all woven together. The first thing these people want is to get ‘back to normal’ - I’m with Oslo, there isn’t time for laborious untangling of things.
We had a previous thread about re-using sandbags; evidently this is not done due to contamination by the floodwaters. Looks like the same problem (contamination) can exist in woody debris:
Heck with the lumber, millions of $ of perfectly good furniture and appliances get thrown out. In a disaster, picking through the debris just isn’t something people are able to do. I know I threw out lots of perfectly good material, but one can’t take the time and mental effort necessary to sort it out from the truly bad stuff. That is what makes a disaster different from a regular job.
After Andrew, there were a number of collection points for the debris. A fair amount of scrap metal was recovered, and a whole lot of mulching was going on.
There were a number of loosely organized private outfits working on this - from doing demo to hauling to mulching, and there were people involved with recovering just about anything with value.
But therein lies the rub: the cost of recovering, cleaning,and transporting things like lumber relative to the value at the point of sale may make it not economical. I remember standing on a very big hill of stuff that wasn’t going to be recovered - it is now terrain.
My apology, I should have been more specific. Yes the sandbags were contaminated by floodwater; if you’ll read the linked article it’s talking about the pretreated lumber of yesterday, as you mention. I kind of skipped a step there.
Believe me on this. There is not time after a disaster to sort and reuse what isn’t destroyed beyond salvage. It’s a monumental a task to just remove it and get on with life.
I can see that. But if they piled it in a landfill it would be pretty easy to rebuild your house without ever purchasing framing lumber. The picture I saw was of a bunch of roof trusses piled up. It would have been easy pickings for a do-it-yourselfer.
The problem is they have to let it sit somewhere until somebody would get to sorting. There is no nearby place to put it so it can be salvaged a year or two later. The liability once they move it is on whomever owns where the stuff is stored. Having people just pick through it is not an option. Much of the material is contaminated, and a disease vector. A little cut is more likely to become septic and you may come in contact with a dangerous chemical residue. The contamination has soaked into much of the material, and when it gets moved everything will be contaminated, by contact with the already contaminated stuff.
It comes down to there isn’t time or manpower to sort stuff after the disaster. After it’s moved everything is contaminated and a liability to a property owner that would let somebody sort through it. The salvaged lumber can be chemically contaminated and is more likely to have mold spores waiting to spread in the new construction.
Too labor intensive when the few people available are required to do other stuff. Unless they do like the people did in San Francisco when it was flattened. They had the labor because the people were forced to do it. It’s not something you want to try today.