REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE EVERYWHERE YOU CAN

I recently had the opportunity to work with Roosterhead Antique Heart Pine & Brick, Inc. and felt that their operation exemplified the art of recycling and wanted to share their story. As you may know, the preferred hierarchy of solid waste is – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and lastly, incinerate or landfill.

Reducing means cutting back on the use of materials (both virgin and recycled) when manufacturing products and the practice of consumers purchasing only what is really needed, and in bulk whenever feasible, to reduce packaging needs. Another aspect of this practice is “reducing” the need for natural resources through reusing and recycling.

Reuse, the second most preferred practice, is pretty self explanatory. Reusing items as many times as possible before discarding as either a recyclable or trash item. This is where Roosterhead excels. They sell wood, antique wood previously used in structures built from about 1850 through about 1920. Marc Reed and his father, Robert Weed, have developed a network of people from as far north as Chicago to almost anywhere east of the Mississippi. This network alerts them to buildings being torn down that have old heart pine beams in them that can be salvaged and turned into flooring, stair treads, hand rails, newel posts, moldings, crowns and baseboard. Not only do they create these items here in Rome, but they also ship to other cabinet and mill work shops so they can also produce genuine, heart pine pieces.

Marc says that he feels good about preventing “pieces of history from being thrown away” and at the same time helping keep landfills from filling up with materials that still have many years of useful life. Many of the beams he purchases are kept on site waiting for an opportunity to help someone restore an old home with wood originally cut during the exact era that the home was built and therefore maintaining its integrity as it is being renovated. It is difficult to preserve original wood flooring since much of the tongue and groove is destroyed during “deconstruction” so there is a great demand to create “new” wood flooring out of these old beams. Although the cuts are new, the wood is the old original heart pine used before the turn of the century and the end result is an almost identical look in flooring.

Roosterhead is building a web site that will be ready within a month or so. In the meantime, if you want more information on the company call Marc at 706/233-9358 or e mail him at roosthead@aol.com. If you work for, or know of, a company that uses a recycled product as a raw material please let me know so I can highlight other companies that are using the REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE principal.