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Every year, Americans throw away enough steel to rebuild Manhattan, enough aluminum to rebuild the nation’s entire commercial air fleet four times over, and enough wood to heat 50 million homes for 20 years, according to Edward Humes in his 2012 book “Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash.”

Locally, officials at city and regional levels say developers and builders aren’t recycling half as much as they think they are. Portland requires that at least 75 percent of materials from construction projects valued over $50,000 be recycled. But that isn’t preventing a lot of items from landing in landfills.

“The big, shocking component is … around 20 to 25 percent of our landfill material is related to construction and demolition activities,” said Shawn Wood, construction waste specialist for the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. “It’s even more in some areas. In some areas it’s as much as half related to it.”

Wood said people’s false notions about sustainability are helping to build that mountain of waste. For instance, Portland’s 75 percent requirement allows builders to dump various materials into the same bin. Some people might think that when all project materials go into one recycling bin, all are being recycled – but they aren’t.

After being twisted, compacted and crunched into recycle bins, those “recyclables” go to a material recovery facility – or MRF – and are dumped onto a conveyer belt and sorted by line workers. By the time they get through the jumbled mess, Wood said, they’re typically able to save only about 25 to 40 percent. The rest goes to a landfill.

Some MRFs claim to recycle 80 percent of the materials they receive, but Wood said that’s because they’re counting the residual stuff pulverized in the demolition and delivery process, and used instead of soil for landfill cover. Omit that “alternative daily cover” material and their recycling rates are closer to 25 to 40 percent.

“Recycling is almost at the bottom of the waste hierarchy pyramid,” Wood said. “It’s ‘reduce, re-use, recycle,’ and recycle is at the end of the list for a reason. Other than it going straight to the landfill, it’s the least desirable outcome.”

That is unless contractors separate the waste by material, in which case the amount recycled jumps to 95 to 100 percent. An even more sustainable option is deconstruction – methodically dismantling buildings in the reverse order they were built, and then reusing the materials.

DeConstruction Services – a contracting arm of the ReBuilding Center on North Mississippi Avenue – can typically salvage 85 percent of a building’s major components for reuse. The rest gets recycled.

“Someone was quoted from a construction company saying, ‘That’s great if you want to pay 15 times the amount (of demolition),’ ” ReBuilding Center Executive Director Shane Endicott said. “But we (cost) barely more than the demo.”

Deconstruction can actually be more cost-effective than demolition in some situations, he said. As a general rule, deconstruction of an average house costs about 15 percent more, but that’s not taking into account for donating building materials.

“When you take in tax subsidies, we have clients that come out way on top,” Endicott said.

For instance, DeConstruction Services once gutted a Northwest Portland house for $5,000. The value of the resulting tax write-off was more than $20,000.

Another benefit of deconstruction, Endicott said, is that because of overhead-related costs, it can support eight jobs while demolition may rely on one excavator. He believes this presents an opportunity for excavation companies to grow, and said he would speak with anybody interested to learn more.

Deconstruction was actually commonplace in the first half of the 20th century, but fell out of favor in the 1970s, according to Endicott. He said that’s a shame because there’s a huge market for used building materials. Today, the ReBuilding Center moves an average of eight tons of materials per day. People from all over the world buy its materials; a few weeks ago, a man from Japan purchased 150 light fixtures.

In the past, companies paid the ReBuilding Center to take their large timber beams. Now the nonprofit can’t buy them because they’re in such high demand.

“By simply changing our relationship with (waste) and getting it into reuse, (the ReBuilding Center has) been able to change that same material into an asset that’s benefited the community – socially, economically and throughout the whole spectrum of sustainability,” he said.

The ReBuilding Center sells those used materials for 25 cents on the dollar, and since 1998 has saved customers approximately $75 million, according to Endicott. The self-sustaining nonprofit has totaled approximately $25 million in sales in that time, providing full benefits to roughly 35 employees off of what the community formerly was paying to throw away, he said.

Some ReBuilding Center employees have left to create their own for-profit models, and Endicott said that if others want to do the same he’ll gladly share his business plan.

Other than tax subsidies or resale of materials, however, local municipalities don’t have a lot of carrots they can dangle in front of developers to convince them to choose deconstruction, Wood said. But there is one more benefit. As demolition activity grows in Portland, so does neighborhood opposition. Wood said deconstruction can be a powerful olive branch.

“It’s like capital punishment – we care how things die,” he said. “Standing in front of 20 rifles is different than injection, and it’s kind of the same thing with deconstruction.”

Demolition and waste

According to data compiled by Shawn Wood, construction waste specialist for the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, the city in 2013 received 273 applications for single-family home demolitions. That is up from 209 in 2012 and just 140 in 2011. Through June 3, the city received 135 applications, so this year’s total is on track to exceed 300 (not counting remodels, which Wood says account for 85 percent of construction waste).

An average Portland home is approximately 1,119 square feet, and every square foot produces close to 115 pounds of waste, according to Wood. So, if all 273 of those demolitions planned last year were to move forward, they would produce roughly 17,565 tons of waste – with at least 10,539 tons going into landfills (assuming a 40 percent recycle rate).