SELCO Credit Union: a case study in quantifying the environmental impacts of design for deconstruction

Abstract

Architect Daniel Herbert designed the SELCO Credit Union in Eugene, Oregon in 1972 to maximize the amount of material that could eventually be salvaged for re-use or recycling at the end of the life of the building. While there are no immediate plans to take the building down, this paper uses the current environmental value of the building material and current local building deconstruction and material recovery practices to conduct a speculative analysis of the environmental consequences of the architect's intention to design for eventual deconstruction. To conduct this analysis, we asked and then investigated the following questions: 1) Based on international carbon and energy factors for each of the building materials, what is the environmental value in terms of embodied energy and carbon of the quantities of building materials used? 2) If the building were deconstructed today, what parts of the building could be diverted from the waste stream for direct reuse, what could be recycled into new materials, and what would be sent to landfills? By categorizing quantities of building materials by degree of recovery and by cradle to gate carbon and energy impact, we estimated that more than one third of the embodied energy and about one third of the carbon embodied in the existing building could be recovered. Much of this savings can be attributed directly to three of the architect's decisions: 1) To build with a panelized plywood roof system, 2) To use uniformly sized concrete panels that can be disassembled, and 3) To use bolted trusses of high-value timber. We can conclude that if this case study building were deconstructed today that the architect's decision to design for deconstruction would result in measureable resource savings.