Group diverts spec samples from landfill
By: Chrissy Kadleck
November 09, 2009

With an organizational goal of planned obsolescence, ZeroLandfill is a volunteer-based, seasonal program that works to connect expired specification samples from the construction industry to local artists and arts educators in six cities in the United States.

ZeroLandfill has projects in Boston and five cities within Ohio, including Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron and its founding location of Cleveland where the project was created in 2006. Each location then adopts the ZeroLandfill prefix before its city name as in ZeroLandfill Cleveland or ZeroLandfill Boston.

Since its inception, more than 284,000 pounds of carpet tiles and books, glass samples, paint decks and laminate chips, upholstery swatches, wall covering books and wood flooring samples have been detoured from the waste stream, said Michael Dungan, co-founder of ZeroLandfill.

Dungan, and two colleagues from construction industry, Jeff Krejci of commercial carpet company InterfaceFlor and interior designer Amanda Dempsey, all shared the same concern that there were valuable items being misclassified as waste and ending up in the trash bin.

“We started collecting primarily specification samples from architects, contractors and interior designers and the intent was to recycle them. It led into a reuse practice known as upcycling,” he said. “We are not tearing them apart to recycle or transport long distances but finding homes right in the local community for the same items with people who were actually looking for the same items and willing to pay for them in some cases.”

Just this past summer, ZeroLandfill projects in Cincinnati upcycled 67,000 pounds of material and projects in Cleveland upcycled 50,160 pounds. In May, Toledo upcycled 9,656 pounds and Akron upcycled 8,376 pounds in February.

“We should be at 300,000 pounds by the end of this month,” Dungan said. “We have a 97% average upcycling rate and 3% disposal rate.”

The supply side of ZeroLandfill is from interior design firms, manufacturers of construction products, architects, general contractors, property managers, and the demand side is the creative community, which is comprised of working artists, artisans, designers and educators.

Take Jonathan Sin-jin Satayathum, a Cleveland-based LEED AP principal designer and sustainability director at The Greenhouse Tavern, the first nationally certified green restaurant in Ohio.

Satayathum is one of 12 core volunteers and advisers with ZeroLandfill Cleveland. Through his design he was able to source a number of material streams to create unique and wonderful features in the award-winning restaurant.

For instance, Satayathum incorporated discarded carpet tiles samples that are produced in a sustainable factory and with high-recycled content. He used the collection to make a patchwork quilt in motley creating a lovely effect, he said.

Currently Zero Landfill is a seasonal effort due to lack of funding. Once volunteers attract discarded materials to a central location using social media techniques such as blogging, Twitter, e-mail campaigns and viral communication, anyone who is interested can come collect the materials during a designated time period.

It’s an early-bird-gets-the-worm scenario, and it works, Dungan said.

“These are community projects and they run on volunteer hours and sponsor dollars,” he said. “We have not been able to secure enough sponsor dollars or volunteer commitments to work the projects year round. It has led to the need for us to launch a technology response to help supplement the seasonality of these projects.”

In response, Dungan has developed a technology counterpart to ZeroLandfill called BeeDance, which will launch in January 2010 and facilitate material upcycling in an online setting versus on the ground.

“It will be able to support the work and the mission and the spirit of ZeroLandfill and its projects worldwide on a 24-7 basis,” he said, adding that he also is taking the ZeroLandfill model to scale in other cities.

“We’ve been approached and are working with folks in Tennessee and Texas to launch ZeroLandfill programming in major markets in both of those states,” he said. “We’re working with five to 10 new cities to launch the program there in 2010.”

Dungan’s long term goal for ZeroLandfill? “We go away,” he said. “For that to happen the shift has to occur in how we look at waste so we are really helping to facilitate the education around the potential that waste really has.”

If ZeroLandfill does its job and creates a closed-loop for normally discard construction materials, the organization will ultimately become unnecessary.

“It’s a big vision and we don’t know if it’ll happen in our lifetimes,” he said. “But with 51 project days with a handful of volunteers, we’ve found almost 150 tons of items of value that somebody else was looking for. As the word continues to grow and we become a presence online, we really think we could create a shift in how waste is viewed and treated and defined.”

Copyright 2009 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.