The Second R

“Reduce Reuse Recycle” as been around for a while but it seems to me that the recycling part has stolen most of the attention. Building materials are recyclable but buildings themselves are not. What they are is reusable. That leads me to this article on Curbed about the conversion of the Brookfield Avenue Landfill in Staten Island into a park.

The difference between reuse and recycling is the nature of the thing that is under discussion. Commodities can be recycled. One piece of aluminum is the same as another, so recycling cans makes sense. The old practice of cleaning and refilling glass bottles was based on them being a commodity, as is the newer practice of melting them down and recasting them. Concrete can be recycled to some degree into aggregate for new concrete because it’s a commodity.

Buildings or landscapes are not interchangeable equally-valued commodities. They can be reused, they can be altered for new occupancy (AKA adaptive reuse), they can be demolished and replaced. With few exceptions they are unique to the people who use them even if they are physically identical to other buildings. If you were to ask people who live in a rowhouse if they would swap with another identical house down the block, assuming that the hassles of moving were taken care of for them, the answer would be “no” most of the time. Inanimate objects don’t have meaning us because we anthropomorphize them; we anthropomorphize them because they have meaning for us. People are attached to their house even if there are physically identical houses nearby because it’s theirs, not a commodity. They cannot be recycled.

Land in general is another non-commodity. New York City is short on both open space and land for development, which means that getting land available for new parks is extremely difficult. Converting a brown-field site to a park is a win-win: a polluted site is removed and a new park is created. Adaptive reuse on a large scale is still reuse and we’re all better off for it.