Saving a Lifetime of Waste
Happy New Year, Smart Recyclers! 🎉
We hope you had a restful holiday season and are settling into the new year. Speaking of new, doesn’t the start of a new year feel like the perfect time to try something different? It did for us! So, we decided to mix things up with a video newsletter on a topic we’ve never broached before: deconstruction.
It was inspired by a statistic that blew our minds: Demolishing one average-sized house can create as much waste as a person generates over their entire lifetime. 🤯
The good news is that there are people in Massachusetts finding ways to reuse buildings and salvage the materials they’re made of. One way to do this is to deconstruct buildings instead of demolishing them. Deconstruction is the process (and really the art) of taking buildings apart so materials can be reused or recycled and kept in our local economy. It’s essentially the unbuilding of a building, and our video below breaks it all down. 😉
Psst! We’re on YouTube 👀 Like and subscribe to our channel for more video content about reducing, reusing, and recycling.
Spotlight on Salvage: Spectacle Pond Farm
Interior of the Main Barn on Spectacle Pond Farm. 📷: DCR
Last year, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) piloted a salvage project at Spectacle Pond Farm, a large tract of land nestled in the southwest corner of the state. The property included a collection of farm buildings dating back to the late 18th century.
One of these buildings is an abattoir, a type of slaughterhouse that’s the only one of its kind, that we know of, in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the other farm buildings were not structurally sound enough to rehabilitate, but they contained windows, doors, and valuable old-growth timber (most likely from trees on the property) that could be salvaged and used to restore the abattoir.
With the help of architects and engineers, DCR restored the abattoir using approximately 75% salvaged materials from the other buildings on site. Now, it’ll live on as a place for education and a piece of MA’s agricultural history.
This project marks the first step in a larger effort to reuse historic structures and materials on state land. Read more about it.
📚What We’re Reading
- The Deconstruction of Matthews Arena Will Be ‘Very Surgical’ – Northeastern Global News
- Beyond SNAP, Tons of Crops Gleaned, Given to People Who Need Food Assistance – New England Public Media
- Franklin County Organizations Find New Ways to Cut Waste with Sustainability Grants – Greenfield Recorder
- A Look at Massachusetts’ Food Waste Disposal Ban – Waste360
- Ohio Startup Creates End Market for Small Challenging Plastics – Resource Recycling
- Reuse Wins at Events – Upstream
Here’s to a productive and healthy 2026!
The Recycle Smart MA Team at MassDEP