Preservation Matters
Work on the roof replacement and cupola repair of King Solomon’s Lodge #1 began the third week of January. Though the biggest part of the project is on the horizon, we’re very grateful for the response to date. Special thanks go to Stanley Trice, who has written more than a dozen grants for the project, which is a team effort between King Solomon’s Lodge #1 and the New Bern Preservation Foundation. Early money from some of those grants and generous contributions from folks here in New Bern have gotten us off to a good start.
Preservation like this is the “greenest” option, after all. The concept of being green is about environmental cost, both before and after construction. After construction, a green home will use less energy, generally speaking, than a home built without using green technology. But does that make the modern home greener? The answer is—not always.
Over the holidays, a friend described a wonderful energy-efficient home she’d visited last summer. I was glad to hear about those new technologies, since I’m a bit of a nerd that way. But an older home had been razed to make room for the new house. So as she told me about her friend’s ultra-green home, I couldn’t help remembering something Preservation NC’s Myrick Howard said at our Annual Meeting a couple of years ago: “The greenest building is the one already built.” It’s said that architect Carl Elefante at Quinn Evans in Washington, D.C. first coined that phrase. It does bear repeating.
As efficient as new, LEED-compliant or energy-efficient homes are after they are built, the process of building may not be very “green” at all. Raw materials must be processed, shipped, packaged, delivered on site, unpackaged, and assembled. All that work requires lots of resources and energy. Carbon dioxide emissions, if you will. Though as it also stimulates our economy and creates jobs, if you’re building on an empty lot, by all means make your building energy efficient.
But if the energy-efficient structure replaces an older structure, the “green” picture changes. Apart from the cost of manufacture and transport of new building materials, the EPA estimates that 548 million tons of demolition debris is generated in the United States yearly by new construction projects. For comparison, that’s three times the amount of household waste put into landfills each year. Demolition waste is, by far, the leading component of landfills nation-wide.
Of course restoration expends resources and creates waste, too. But on average, restoration of a home or building like King Solomon’s Lodge #1 generates the barest fraction of the waste of new construction. And preservation employs a lot of people and helps stimulate our economy by using, in a more limited way, new products and materials. Preservation doesn’t just keep beautiful workmanship alive for future generations; it is also the “greener” option.
So we can be proud that even our possibly-drafty, energy-inefficient historic structures net out as quite green, actually.
New Bern Preservation Foundation, Inc.
www.newbernpf.org • info@newbernpf.org • 252.633.6448