Our friend and mentor David Bennink sends us this message:

I have been working for the City of Chicago to develop the Nation’s largest building deconstruction training program and I am happy to say that we will soon choose a recipient and get started.

It will be a complex effort for many reasons, not the least of which is that we cannot work on any residential properties due to restrictions from the funding source.

My hope for the program is that for the next 2.5 years, we will infuse a lot of salvaged building materials, capital, and ‘free’ labor into operations around the Chicago area thus strengthening the reuse industry. We also hope to provide the area many qualified individuals that have gone through the training program and are ‘job-ready’.

On other fronts, RE-USE Consulting has taken down all of its last 17 homes in 5 days or less while mainly working with trainees. We experimented with a 1 day home where a 1250 sq ft building was partially deconstructed and the remaining parts demolished. We added our 34th State and are only a couple structures away from deconstructing our 500th building.

In general, it is good to see programs like that in Chicago help build up our industry. Have hope and know that we are closing in on making deconstruction time and cost competitive with demolition and look forward to the day when deconstruction is the mainstream choice for building removal.