Bottled Water & Recession Proof Construction

Your bottled water burns up a LOT of oil...




This is the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams in for Lester Graham.




We Americans love our bottled water... for a lot of reasons.




VOX “If I’m out somewhere and I happen to want something to drink and I’d rather get water than pop or coffee or something else like that... If I’m in Mexico I drink bottled water... Because it’s available.”




We actually drink more bottled water than beer.




And that bottled water uses lots of energy. As much as 2-thousand times more than tap water.




That’s from a new study in the journal Environmental Research Letters. . All that energy goes into making the bottles... treating the water... and of course shipping. Sometimes from as far away as the South Pacific.




Peter Gleick (glick) is an author of the study. He says if you want to use less energy... tap water is the clear winner.




“Tap water may require a thousandth of the energy that it takes to bottle water. And the tap water in the United States is typically of very, very high quality, as high or higher than most of our bottled waters.”




He says buying local bottled water save more energy. So he says try to buy as close to home as you can.




STING






















This is the Environment Report.




In the middle of a recession that’s crippling the construction field, there’s at least one sector of the industry that’s doing pretty well. That’s “material reuse”- taking pieces of old buildings and using them in new ones. Samara Freemark has the story of one re-use company that’s both green -- and in the black:










You’ve probably heard what’s going on in the construction industry these days.




News montage: housing starts off…building at a standstill….etc




But in middle of all that bad news, there might be one bright spot.




CUT Hardin :08




We’ve actually been expanding quite a bit. I guess it’s one of the only times I’ve heard of where that’s the case.







That’s architect Brad Hardin.




He got interested in reusing building materials pretty early in his career. He likes the way the old stuff looks. And he likes the idea of saving resources. And he hates the tens of millions of tons of construction waste that get tossed into landfills every year.




But actually getting his hands on used materials, so that he could reuse them- that turned out to be a real pain in the butt.




CUT Hardin :10




You know you’ll be literally going out to someone’s yard and getting rained on, or sorting through someone’s basement-- it was kind of a hit and miss process.




A big part of the problem was simple logistics. There’s no real secondhand market for used construction materials- not like there is in, say, the car industry, where you’d know exactly how to go about selling an old engine or buying a used transmission.




That was the problem Hardin wanted to solve – how to create a secondhand market for spare building parts. He figured if he could do that, reusing building materials could actually end up…profitable.




So last year he started a company called Planet ReUse. Buyers and sellers of reclaimed materials can find each other on the company’s website. And Planet ReUse tests all material to make sure buyers don’t end up with, say, eight tons of rotten planking. And they arrange all the shipping- trying to hook up sellers to nearby buyers.




By removing those basic barriers, Hardin says his buyers save about 20% compared to buying new. And Planet ReUse still makes a profit.




And it’s also a start to reducing those millions of tons of landfill waste.




So… what kind of stuff does he sell on the site?




CUT :10

HARDIN how much time do you have? Steel, flooring….[under]




It turns out there’s money in just about everything you can salvage from a building.




Harry Giles is a professor of green architecture at the University of Michigan. He says that cash is the key to cutting down waste.




GILES :09




If people see that it’s a lucrative business to actually salvage materials, that will drive it much faster than concern for the environment.




And it’s not just buildings. Remember President Obama’s inauguration stage? Well, that got torn down, and Planet ReUse is trying to get the pieces to New Orleans. They’ll be used to rebuild houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina.




It’s just one more way for Planet ReUse to prove that you can do good, be green, and make a little money too.




For the ER, I’m SF







That’s the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.