When Donald MacPherson inherited his late uncle’s house, he wanted to preserve the memories worn into the floorboards and written on the wall beside the phone.
But like many century homes, the bungalow located off the Danforth in Toronto’s east end was falling apart and would cost more to shore up than to tear down.
So instead of demolishing the house and tossing everything in a dumpster, MacPherson enlisted the help of a deconstruction company to salvage as much as possible.
“My uncle would have loved this,” said MacPherson. “He was actually a major recycler. He couldn’t walk by a useful tool lying on the street without picking it up.”
Toronto is scrambling to reduce the amount of garbage it produces. At a time when landfills are filling up, and construction, renovation and demolition waste make up nearly a quarter of the material being sent there, deconstruction is emerging as a way to divert tons of trash while also creating new markets for old materials — many of which simply cannot be acquired any other way.
“The government has us sorting the garbage in our kitchen,” MacPherson said. “But then someone can come along and just tear a whole house down, put it in the back of a truck and take it to the dump without any of that going on.”
“It sort of makes a mockery of all that.”
How deconstruction works
Standing in the basement, where sagging foundation walls were slated to come down, MacPherson looked up at the oversized joists spanning the entire width of the house. They were milled from Ontario old-growth hemlock and spruce in larger dimensions that aren’t available anymore.
“This kind of lumber is gold,” said Steph Bonic, Chief Operating Officer of Ouroboros Deconstruction, as she scouted the house before the salvage work began. “It’s more moisture-resistant, rot-resistant and fire-resistant than any of the lumber that you’re seeing now. It has tighter growth rings, and it’s just developed more resistance over the years.”
“As long as there aren’t notches or too many holes in them, they can be reused for structure. Hopefully, these will be used to build a laneway house or an addition,” she said.
This summer, workers for Ouroboros took MacPherson’s house down piece by piece, salvaging the doors and windows, the floorboards and trim, the sinks and the light fixtures. The plaster was taken to a plant to be ground up and recycled into drywall. Bricks were delivered to a brickyard, where they will be reused to match old masonry in projects across the city.
With the revenue from reselling these materials, instead of throwing them in a dumpster, the company says it can often deconstruct for the same price or less than a demolition company.
“Our main goal is to divert from landfill,” said CEO Meredith Moore, who started Ouroboros during the pandemic after wandering her neighbourhood and being shocked by the number of construction dumpsters on front lawns. “There are so many bins out in this city, all filled with cabinets and old-growth wood, and it’s all getting trashed.”
While large-scale construction and demolition projects are legally required to divert certain materials from landfill (though the Auditor General found much of the waste ended up in landfill anyway), Moore says smaller single-family renovation projects are unregulated and simply default to throwing everything away because they aren’t aware there is any other option. “Once people learn about deconstruction, they say: ‘Oh, that just makes so much sense.’”
Mostly referred by word of mouth, Ouroboros’ early clients were “people who had renovated their homes before and general contractors who have been doing this for so long that they started to feel bad about all the waste,” she said.
’It’s kind of a tragedy that we’re not doing it here’
According to City Hall, Toronto produces 2.1 million tonnes of trash each year. While households collectively produce more than twice as much waste as the construction sector, they are much better at recycling and composting, keeping more than half of their waste out of the landfill. The construction industry, by contrast, only diverts 12 per cent of its waste and ends up contributing almost as much trash to landfill as all the houses in the city combined.
But these numbers are based on estimates. The truth is that because construction waste isn’t allowed in municipal landfills, all the wood, brick, metal, drywall and glass is generally hauled away to private landfills, where there is little oversight. Because of this, the government doesn’t really know how much waste is produced by construction and renovation projects, or if it’s being disposed of properly.
“It’s ridiculous that we don’t have better regulations that force that material to get recycled,” said Emily Alfred, a waste campaigner with the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
In the past, companies have tried to set up construction-waste-sorting facilities, charging a premium over landfill and offering environmental certifications, Alfred said. But these businesses failed because contractors weren’t willing to pay extra.
“It’s a distorted economic system that externalizes a lot of environmental costs, and we’re going to have to confront those at some point,” she said.
While cities in the U.S. like Portland, Ore., and Milwaukee require certain types of housing to be deconstructed rather than demolished, and European cities like Amsterdam have tried to create a market for salvaged materials by pledging to build new houses with reused material, few have enacted as strict regulations as Vancouver, where much of the city was constructed using old-growth timber.
There, any house built before 1910 must salvage three tons of wood and any house built before 1950 must recoup 75 per cent of all building materials by weight.
“It’s kind of a tragedy that we’re not doing it here,” Alfred said.
In Ouroboros’ Leslieville warehouse, doors are stacked against a wall and sinks are arranged on the floor beside a pile of marble countertops. Oak flooring overflows from a giant recycling bin like a spiky haircut.
Before MacPherson’s house was taken down, the vintage joists were hauled back here, de-nailed and stockpiled for resale. This kind of lumber has proven to be popular among Ouroboros’ clients, who buy the massive old-growth beams to install as eye-catching features in new buildings or renovated houses.
While every project gets priced individually, in general, Moore says they can compete on gut jobs and interior renovations where it doesn’t take more time to salvage material than it does to throw them out. It’s harder to compete on teardowns where backhoes and bobcats can take down an entire building in a day.
“It does feel like a David and Goliath battle most days because demolition is so cheap and fast,” she said. “But so many people feel strongly about this that there’s now a deconstruction ecosystem in Toronto. We’re not alone.”
