Historic Preservation

Historic Preservation is Green!

The GREEN buzzword in today’s environmental movement is "sustainability," a key component of which is recycling. Historic preservation is recycling on the grandest scale. According to a recent memo by the National Trust for Historic Preservation,

“Tearing down an older home can be a huge environmental mistake and waste of dollars. Here’s why:

An older home represents a substantial investment in energy. It took energy to mill the timber . . . energy to manufacture the bricks or cinderblocks . . . energy to create glass for the windows . . . energy to produce the pipes.

It also took energy to transport those materials to a construction site. And it took still more energy to assemble the materials into a building. So . . .

If you keep that building intact, updating and improving as needed, you’re actually saving energy and conserving natural resources."

Sustainability is the Key

The Pew Center on Global Climate Change finds that 43% of carbon dioxide emissions in the US comes from the operation of buildings. Even more greenhouse gas emissions are associated with manufacturing new building materials and products.

Here are a few facts:

• About 80 billion BTUs of energy are embodied in a typical 50,000-square-foot commercial building. Tearing down that building would negate all the benefit of recycling more than 60 million aluminum cans!
• Demolishing the building also would create nearly 4,000 tons of waste. That’s enough debris to fill a train of 26 railroad cars!
• It’s estimated that constructing a new 50,000-square-foot commercial building in place of the old one would release about the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as driving a car 2.8 million miles -- or 112 trips around the Earth!

Historic buildings are not energy hogs; the federal government recognizes the fact that their older buildings use 27% less energy than their more modern buildings.