We live in a culture that celebrates the new. If your jeans go out of style, buy a new pair; if an old building starts acting up, tear it down and build a new one. These values, however, are not sustainable. On a planet of finite resources, the waste generated in construction and demolition makes up a huge portion of U.S. landfills. Carnegie Mellon’s Green Design Institute estimates that new construction creates 50 percent more greenhouse gases than does renovation. Yet the recent scourge of structural breakdowns on campus — Jones Field House and Johnson House to name two — may provide a convincing argument to start from the ground up. As the College looks over its aging structures and starts drafting new plans, it has a choice: restore, deconstruct or demolish?

“We cannot build our way to sustainability,” argues Cleveland Restoration Society Associate Director Sarah Hobbs. “We can’t continue this path of demolishing buildings and constructing anew. Preservation supports sustainability goals in so many ways.”

In her Tuesday lecture, “The Greenest Building is Already Built,” she explained the environmental and aesthetic benefits of restoring old buildings. Hobbs gave tips to homeowners on how to improve and restore buildings and urged Oberlin to live up to its reputation of green living, estimating that the demolition of one small building wipes out the entire environmental benefit of recycling 1.3 million aluminum cans.

Oberlin, as it considers the future of its 100-year-old houses, would do well to consider the restoration benefits of weather-stripping and storm windows before making the drastic decision to tear down and build up. Even constructing a new LEED-certified house, Hobbs says, is worse for the environment than bringing an existing house up to the same standard. Preservation is the ultimate recycling.

Sometimes, however, a building is either beyond all hope or can’t be used for the appropriate purpose. The Oberlin alumni constructing a mixed-use facility on East College Street couldn’t exactly convert a gas station, a Buick dealership and a fast food chain into energy efficient condos and restaurants, so they did their own green brand of demolition.

“What we did was to take extra time and care in the demolition process to remove recyclable and reusable materials,” said Ben Ezinga, OC ’01. “We consider it deconstruction, as opposed to conventional demolition, because ideally what you’re doing is taking a building apart in the same way as it was built.”

The group, which goes by the name Sustainable Community Associates, started with furniture and appliances, which it either sold or gave away, then moved on to remove all interior drywall and non-structural walls. It sent the drywall to a company in Cleveland that crushes it up to make new drywall and shipped all the lumber to be turned into mulch. The block and concrete was crushed up at a yard in Elyria to be reused mostly as road base and gravel. The group then recycled all metal piping and metal wiring at scrap metal yards in Elyria. “It gets melted down into new metal, which takes, I think, about 25 to 50 times less energy than refining new metal,” explained Ezinga.

The only trouble, according to Ezinga, was the roof, which consisted of “lots of nasty old asphalt and tar paper over wood decking over a steel truss frame.” Because these materials were stuck together, they couldn’t be separated into their recyclable parts.

The College may hesitate to adopt this sustainable practice because of the expense. After all, nothing’s cheaper than a wrecking ball and a dump. But the expense is not always easy to estimate. “It’s tough to put costs — in dollars and time — onto the process, because it all depends on how far you want to take it,” said Ezinga.

Comparing his procedure to normal demolition, he estimated, “For wood-framed buildings, you’ll pay a little more, and it’ll take a lot longer. For steel-framed buildings, you’ll probably pay a little less, and it’ll take a little longer.”

Furthermore, there is more than one type of “cost.” The National Association of Home Builders estimates, “If 25 percent of the buildings demolished every year were deconstructed, approximately 20 million tons of debris could be diverted from landfills.”

This summer, the College will be renovating Noah, Harvey, Kade and Price, and the process will involve what Sustainability Coordinator Nathan Engstrom calls “minor demolition.”

“In general, the College does do quite a bit to reuse or recycle common building materials and furnishings,” said Engstrom. “Carpeting in particular is a material that we recycle virtually all of.” Over the past four years, Oberlin has recycled 177,057 square feet of used carpet; saving 208.8 cubic yards of landfill space; 112,136.1 gallons of water; 184,434.4 pounds of CO2 and 1,227,418,143 BTUs of energy.

While this is an accomplishment, Engstrom recognizes that it is not enough. As whispers fly about the future of the well-named Old Barrows and other buildings, he encourages the College “to think about how we can purchase and recycle additional materials and even apply these principles to entire projects or even whole buildings.”