Reclamation of Wood Materials Coated with Lead-Based Paint
Abstract
Tens of thousands of temporary wooden buildings from the World War II (WWII) era, consisting of more than 50 million sf of floor area, await removal from numerous U.S. military installations. Wood coated with lead-based paint1 (LBP) makes the removal and disposal of debris from these buildings expensive and also consumes rapidly shrinking landfill capacity. In California, more than 40,000 wooden buildings must be removed from military sites. Wrecking and landfill disposal is the common building removal method; reuse or recovery of the LBP-coated wood is seldom attempted. Removal of the LBP from wood waste could reduce the burden on landfills by 60 75%. Recovered wood could be reprocessed to make high-quality, revenue-generating wood products such as flooring, siding, paneling, and trim. Much of this olold-growthumber would be valuable in the antique architectural millwork market. This project demonstrated a process designed to efficiently reclaim construction materials from obsolete buildings in order to recover their economic value instead of discarding them into a landfill. The objective was to validate the effectiveness of an innovative, environmentally compliant building deconstruction process and woodwork-milling mobile unit (MU) designed to economically and safely reclaim vintage exterior siding and dimensional lumber coated with LBP. In addition to deconstruction, remanufacturing operations, and debris processing, the demonstration encompassed marketing the recovered wood products, evaluating waste-reduction performance, and estimating the cost-effectiveness
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA607018
Entities
People
- Richard G. Lampo
- Tom Napier
Organizations
- Construction Engineering Research Laboratory