Okay.
Good morning, everybody.
Thank you for being here.
Before we get into the substance of today's
very exciting news and we're celebrating, I do want to say that
EPA regional Director Casey' Sixkiller did
guarantee us a victory this afternoon at Oregon State.
So that's why we're wearing our purple.
In all seriousness, good, good, good, good.
Good morning.
I am joined by Casey Sixkiller, General Manager
Andrew Lee from Seattle Public Utilities, and Ben Pearson from Sledge to celebrate
and an extremely important investment that the federal government
is making with with us right here in Seattle in and in our region
that supports everything we're trying to do in terms of our environment.
It gets at the heart of sustainability.
Our city, the City of Seattle's key priorities, as I think everyone that
lives here and works here understands clearly is reducing our carbon footprint.
This week we worked with the county.
We had a great celebration on stream health in some of the very positive
findings that the county's working on with us and the state on
actually
cleaning and measuring the outcomes of our stream health.
And we had some very favorable news.
We also yesterday introduced our building emissions performance
standards legislation to look at the emissions
standards that our buildings are putting out in our city
and came out with some aggressive timelines
and strategies, investments to reduce that as well.
This fits right in to what we're trying to do here in the city,
and that's why I'm so excited about doing this here
in the fastest-growing city in the nation.
We're in a constant state of development, which of course, has
a significant impact on our environment.
We also passed, as you well know, I'm so proud of our voters
who passed the housing levy.
That's a $970 million investment in our housing strategies.
And so this work we're doing here today
looks at the cost of rapid development or development as a general outcome
and says, what must we do to achieve sustainability?
So I'm proud that as we grow and we demolish old infrastructure
and build new infrastructure,
we've been able to do it sustainably in partnerships like this.
That's why this becomes so critical.
So here in Seattle,
we know that nearly 20% of construction waste comes from demolishing homes.
When we demolish homes, we do in ways that
allow us to put now the put the wood of the old buildings to new uses.
We make a significant impact on reducing our carbon footprint
and our waste production.
This couples very, very well with - will
someone hold the phone for a minute - just joking.
This really couples very well in our tree canopy strategies as well.
Now one of our key responsibilities as residents
and businesses is to steward our land and our environment.
And this is why our administration and partners like SPU headed
by Andrew Lee, are very intentional about making
sure that as we grow as a city, our policies
and practices protect our environment and our natural resources.
This announcement today, given by EPA Regional Director
Casey Sixkiller, and many of you know his incredible background
in environmental sustainability and his leadership
that you'll hear from him in just a moment.
This describes our critical investment together that will advance the great work
we're already doing to manage, reduce our solid waste production.
And with that, I welcome EPA Regional Director Casey Sixkiller
to talk more about this investment and the work we're all doing together.
Casey. -Thank you, Mayor.
Well, good morning.
Thank you all so much for being here.
Mayor Harrell,
thank you for making time in your busy schedule, to, to be here today.
This is a really exciting day.
It's a cold day, but it's a really exciting day.
And what an honor for me to be here on behalf of the Biden-Harris administration
to lift up the work that's happening here, happening here locally.
And I think it's really kind of,
you know, just a new chapter yet another chapter in Seattle's long history
of being a leader across the nation in recycling.
And now, as the mayor just said in reuse, I was in Alaska earlier this week.
You know, we have spent all week celebrating
the two-year anniversary of the bipartisan infrastructure law.
You know, this this law, passed two years ago,
created the program that's giving this $4 million grant today.
And all across America, we are seeing local leaders
and communities coming together
to think of innovative ways to expand recycling opportunities.
And that's important for a number of reasons.
Number one is it's the right thing to do.
Secondly, you know, it creates jobs and economic development.
It reduces our greenhouse gas emissions and it creates new opportunities
to reuse products.
And what better way to do that here in the Pacific
Northwest than repurposing old growth timber. Old growth timber
that has put a roof over people's heads for generations
and now is going to continue to do that through this effort here
for many more families across the city as it continues to grow.
This is just a really exciting opportunity, I think, for the city.
And it shows the power of partnerships.
$4 million helps too, but really it's the power of partnerships
and local leadership.
And again, as the mayor said, where we have
innovative businesses doing something cool,
we have local government making decisions about creating
a policy and regulatory space for these opportunities to thrive.
And of course, for the builders who are embracing an opportunity
to do something different.
Every time we deconstruct a building rather than demolish it, we're saving a tree.
And that, I think, is really
what we're celebrating today, an opportunity for us to be smarter
and to realize that there is no one simple solution to tackling climate change.
But this certainly now is a very powerful tool
in the toolbox here locally in Seattle.
So congratulations, mayor and the city.
And with that, I'm going to turn over to Andrew Lee.
-Thank you so much, Casey.
We so appreciate the partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency
on this grant to help us ramp up waste diversion work.
I want to start off with a quick story.
We have a transfer station,
two transfer stations in the north and the south of Seattle.
And and in both of those transfer stations, we actually have viewing rooms
where kids can go and they can see that the garbage being moved around.
And and I remember being in one of those rooms
and hearing a boy, a little boy,
he was looking at the machinery moving around and the waste.
And he made a comment.
He said, Mom, some of that stuff doesn't look like waste.
And and I thought that was profound because that child was exactly right.
You know, every year, like we said, about 17% of our
total debris in the city is is construction debris.
And and that profound statement of that's not waste is completely true.
Through this
grant, we have the opportunity to divert wood for reuse.
And I'm going to say a word out here, which is this idea of a circular economy,
which is this concept that, you know, the life cycle of our goods
and our materials can be continuously used
if we plan for that, if we purpose it that way.
We are one of a handful of cities leading the country in deconstruction
and building out a local wood reuse economy, a circular economy.
We currently offer financial incentives
to customers who choose deconstruction,
but this funding that we're receiving from EPA means we can do so much more.
Specifically it allows us to support the establishment
of a permanent salvaged wood warehouse in Seattle
to bolster, like, like Casey mentioned, a local climate
emissions reducing businesses that don't historically see high profits.
And not only will these businesses be able to better recover materials
and prevent waste,
but they'll be better positioned to also create jobs, job opportunities for people
in our community who may have not have had access to those jobs in the past.
So I'm so thankful for this grant.
Thank you again for the partnership from the federal government
and at this point, I'd like to introduce
it to Ben Pearson, who is the operations manager for Sledge Seattle.
Really a land, a fore blazer trailblazer in this work, a demolition
contractor who we've partnered with to do this incredibly important work.
-Good morning.
Thank you all for being here.
Gonna start off with a little fun fact.
Some of the Douglas fir lumber, which is primarily what we salvage
out of Seattle homes, is over 600 years old.
These trees
could grow to the height of half
the Space Needle and be ten feet wide at their base.
And we don't have too many trees like that left anymore.
So in order to protect this beautiful wood.
And that's why I'm here.
And why Jim Barger, the founder of our company, is here, is
we just think this is a beautiful wood that should not be wasted
and we'll never have it again if we don't protect it now.
I'd also like to thank the three of you for being here.
It means a lot to us to have your support and the funding
is something we've never seen before of this magnitude,
and it will have a huge impact.
So moving,
moving away from demolition, it's a hard thing to do
because it's so easy and inexpensive and moving towards
deconstruction has taken a lot of work to get to this point.
And I feel like we're we're about to take a huge leap forward.
Demolition can be done with an operator,
an excavator, and one person on the ground in a day or two.
And the whole goal is to smash up the house as small as you can
to fit it into a few dumpsters as possible.
But deconstruction, it can take two to three weeks
for the five-man crew or five-person crew. Excuse me.
And that's not the end of it.
That's where the work begins.
Then we have to bring the lumber back to a warehouse.
We have to take the metal hardware off of it, trim it up, store
it, organize it, and then at that point, you're looking at the
that stage that we're at right now is now what do we do with it?
Do we do we put it back into new construction,
which we've put into over 50, we've supplied lumber packs
over 50 new construction projects in the Seattle area.
Ourselves.
I personally have a vision where a lot of this beautiful lumber
should go into higher use like flooring or wall cladding or furniture.
But anyways, thank you so much for being here.
This money and the support of especially Katie Kennedy and Corinne of SPU.
They are by far our biggest supporters and they are making a huge difference.
So thank you.
-Thank you Ben.
And we're going to walk around and tour a little bit and just sort of
look at this beauty around us.
But if there's any question, I'll be more than happy to take any questions.
I'll give you a few seconds.
Yes, sir.
-Yeah, it's a very labor intensive work, as you describe, Ben.
So what else are you going to do as a city to help support the market?
Are you giving any sort of density bonuses to buildings that would incorporate
salvaged wood or or provide salvaged wood?
-Great question. So I'll let Andrew handle it.
And I will tell you that I am sure if if, and Andrew coming to the closer,
I want to comment on what Ben said.
I don't know if you all sensed it, but I sense his passion for this industry.
It's not even what he said, it's just how he said it.
And I'm sure some of our greatest ideas
will come from Ben and those associated with Ben.
I just wanted to throw that out there
and now I can have more substantive answer from Andrew.
-Yeah, right now we're providing two different incentives.
One is a $4,000 incentive to contractors who are,
or owners, who are choosing to go the deconstruction pathway, and that helps
to, you know, ideally help them to offset some of the additional costs.
The other incentive we're providing on the cost side is a $2,000 incentive
when they're bringing on workers who are, need to be trained in the skillset.
And so it's again helping to incentivize job training and job growth.
The third incentive is meant to counter the time aspect of it.
It takes another to like two potentially to three weeks, and as Ben mentioned.
And so from a time aspect, we're providing kind of expedited permitting time
frame for some electrical permits and and that's enabling
the contractors to shave off about two weeks of time.
And so so those two things are the way that we're trying to incentivize
this work right now.
Yeah.
-Thank you, Andrew.
-(off screen, indistinct) Given the numbers, just the cost of, say,
the deconstruction versus demolition, just for a quick comparison.
-Yeah.
You know, Ben, I think you're probably the best person to respond to that.
Yeah.
-Depends on, we do a lot of something called hybrid deconstruction,
which is not ideal.
Basically, we use a machine to assist us to take down a house.
So rather than the two to three weeks, we can do it in a week and a half.
And that's all about economics
is what people are willing to pay for our services.
But we're still able to get in there and salvage a tremendous amount of material.
So for hybrid deconstruction, we're probably about 30% more.
And the grant funds have made a huge difference of bridging the gap,
especially on smaller structures,
but at hand deconstruction, which is where I'd like to get to, I think the lumber
warehouse will have a huge impact of bringing down the total cost
of a hand deconstruction and it will lessen the burden.
Right now I'm having to wear three or four hats.
I'm a deconstruction guy competing against demolition companies
and they're cheaper and quicker.
And then we got to take the material and process it,
and then we got to store it and then try to market or sell it.
So the lumber warehouse will allow us to focus,
if we want to, just on deconstruction and then on the back end to allow the city
to incentivize deconstruction more
because now there'll be the infrastructure to support deconstruction.
So the cost will come down.
But I would say deconstruction by hand is double the price of demolition
at this point.
-What is the price of demolition versus deconstruction?
So $10,000?
-A typical house in Seattle might be like 12 to $15000 to demo,
and that might be like a 1200-1500 square foot house.
We're in the
low, you know, $20,000 to do a hybrid
and you'd be up in the high twenties to to probably do it by hand.
-With a hybrid version (indistict).
Yeah. No, I can, I’d definitely.
I'd love to talk about.
Yeah.
- They have you excited now? -Yeah.
Every house is different, right?
And sometimes, you know, we use a excavator to take the roof off.
So then we can go after, what's easy.
But the main thing is the floor joists, the ceiling joists,
and the old houses all have shiplap, they didn’t have plywood
and we have a market for those materials.
And so that's where we focus our
our time and efforts on. -Well, thank you, everyone have a great day.
But this is an exciting industry, as you could see.
And the innovation that the city is known for, you're seeing it in action here.
We can't thank your leadership and what you're doing with the EPA
to partner with us. So, everyone, have a great day.
Thank you very much for being here.