Green concerns

A house near us is having problems with the floor of one of the rooms on the ground floor, problems which mean that the floor needs to be taken up and its foundations attended to. Taking up means, in this case, ripping out large amounts of substantial, old-style pine floor boards, substantially sound. Ripping out means, in this case, doing so much damage to the boards that they are only fit for chip board or the paper mill.

Next step is to load them all up into a skip, along with all kinds of other builders' rubbish.

It is possible that the timber will be sorted from the masonry at the waste transfer station taking the skip, and put to some use - but I rather doubt it. Dumped entire into a land fill somewhere seems much more likely.

And this from a caring, green community in a reasonably affluent suburb.

While I remember, from the demolition days of my youth in the late 1960's, taking the much lower grade floor boards out of terrace houses up north somewhere, taking them out carefully enough that they could be sold on for so much a foot.

In defence of the reasonably affluent suburb, one ought to add that timber in an anaerobic land fill is quite a good way of capturing the carbon. It will last forever - so we are achieving something. While I associate to a story about a McDonald's beef burger which survived in recognisable form at the bottom of a landfill for some impressive number of years.

All of which reminds me of the complexity of the ebbs and flows of the world of eco green.

PS: one useful by-product is a long plank to be walked by a visiting 2 year old.